Rasu Jilani is a Caribbean-born, New York City native with a dynamic practice as an independent curator, cultural producer, social sculptor, and entrepreneur. His work investigates the intersections of art, culture, and civic engagement to raise critically-conscious conversations between artists, their local communities, and the wider public. Jilani's projects are dedicated to promoting awareness around pressing social issues through exhibitions and community-driven programs. Currently, Rasu serves as the Director of Recruiting and Community Engagement at NEW INC, The New Museum’s creative entrepreneurship incubator for art, tech, and technology.

As a former technologist, Rasu served 11 years as the Senior Information Systems Officer at Columbia Law School. His work included enterprise information systems architecture, data migration, and systems design. Rasu is a proud Alum of Syracuse University.

Rasu: It’s a very winding road. My relationship with art has always been as an outsider. Historically, I was a technologist and I had this envious relationship with my friends who were more creative and unbounded by a job or the rigidity of being in a technical field.

On the side, I used to do parties, festivals, ad hoc exhibitions. I would document and interview a lot of street artists spanning the late 90s to early 2000s. I have a history of doing too much, but at that time it was not formed as an art practice.

Fast forward, and I had a brand called Coup d’etat Brooklyn, which was a fashion and graphic design business. I worked with multiple graphic designers to create social campaigns on T-shirts, which evolved into a movement of artist collectives. Coup d’etat Brooklyn worked with over 120 artists from 2004 to about 2016. From that grew Coup d’etat Arts, and that is what fast tracked me into the cultural sector as an event and cultural producer. I started to be hired by institutions to think about programming in a way that wasn’t traditional. They wanted to figure out, how do you bring more people of color? How do you bring people from the streets and from disparate communities throughout the city into more formalized institutional engagement? That is what started my process of formally being in art.

“How do we take all of the politics away, bring art into it and make it very human? That was my magic.”

BW: What are some examples of the boundary lines of your practice?

RJ: One of the first institutions that gave me validation and credit, and still to this day holds weight, was being part of Afropunk’s early team. At the time it was literally a block party happening in Brooklyn in my neighborhood and the co-founders were friends of mine. Matthew Morgan, one of the founders, put me in to help build out the community beyond [punk] enthusiasts to people who may complicate the notions of punk. That looked like a lot of my friends. We set the foundation for the growth of the Afropunk community.

Between around 2007 and 2013, I was in charge of creating public murals for Afropunk, and I would enlist between six and ten artists a year with a theme. That set the tone.

I went on to do cultural production with Pratt Institute’s Pratt Center for Community Development, as their the first ever art consultant. And then went into theater and built out a whole department of community engagement and community programs for MAPP International, and now I’m at the New Museum working with the NEW INC team.

RJ: This is the magical part, right? I am literally discipline and art agnostic. I never would have considered myself an artist because I don’t have a clear discipline. I can work seamlessly in music, theater, public arts, museum, visual arts, and so on. Whether it be Interactive, VR, AR, and all of the emerging technology phenomenon we are seeing, now, I would focus on the nucleus or the common denominator and work with that. One aspect would be storytelling and the other aspect community building. How do you galvanize people around an authentic story? That’s where I come in.

“I had a friend who got shot because he pulled out a 3 Musketeers bar and the cops thought it was a gun. I was 19 years old when that happened.”

This is where the social sculpting comes into play. I never had a notion or a title to ground the practice. One day I came across an essay describing Jonathan Beuys practice. He is a German artist who did a lot of theater work on the idea of bringing people together to talk about social issues in the arts. And thought,‘That’s what I do!’ I would present very dense political, or scientific, or polarizing material in a way that everyone was interested in. That would be mass incarceration, or gender and women’s rights – these highly publicized and politicized subjects really come down to human interaction. How do we take all of the politics away, bring art into it and make it very human? That was my magic.

BW: What is an example project that sticks in your mind as a hallmark of your practice?

RJ: Combating Mass incarceration is very dear to me. It aligns with many other issues like immigration and gentrification. I was raised in New York City, primarily Queens, which historically is one of the most prolific drug areas in city history. Growing up in that time was oppressive from both sides: from the community in which drugs are pervasive and from the overpolicing of that community. I had a friend who got shot because he pulled out a 3 Musketeers bar and the cops thought it was a gun. I was 19 years old when that happened.

A lot of my friends growing up were in jail over bags of weed or just having things that you and I would probably have in our pocket on a good night. Rockefeller Drug Laws facilitated the mass incarceration of black and brown youth. That was an unfortunate and unjust reality growing up in New York City. That was a flashbulb-memory moment during my youth that left many feeling helpless. I always wanted to do something about it.

As an adult, I immersed myself into philosophies and the history of law enforcement trajectory and criminal law while working at law school for 11 years. I realized there was a correlation between slavery, [Jim Crow] and mass incarceration in this industrial complex that has a history of locking black and brown bodies up.

When I was at MAPP International, I was given the honor of working for the artist Liza Jessie Peterson, building out her community engagement around her project, “The Peculiar Patriot”. We designed a curriculum with the New School. I became her collaborator in de-contextualizing the dense material that she’d been discussing in her artwork after researching for years.

Griot In the Stuy Project By Rasu Jilani, photography by Kwesi Abbensetts In Photo: Bedstuy Community

BW: What have you seen that art can bring uniquely into the conversation around things like mass incarceration or these very polarizing topics in American society or just any society?

RJ: I’m not sure which artist said this, but art allows us to look at society from a critical lens. And that’s art’s role. It’s to critically assess who and where we are. We may not agree with the artist at times, but in retrospect they really captured the moment. We look at James Baldwin who was before his time, but a unique voice to bring light to the injustices of that era. And we look at Salvador Dali or da Vinci, who was an inventor and also a thinker. Artists always set the tone for what’s going on in the times.

What art can also do is present very complex and dense subjects in a way that allows you to digest or reflect back. It gives you time, especially in an era when everything is quickly ready to drive people in that political direction. Art still allows us to depolarize things, to become neutral, and, from a humanist perspective, ready to stand. What do you think about this? How does this make you feel? What is going on? It takes away all the junk we’re fed and allows one to reflect.

I think art does that very well whether it’s media or paintings and sculptures or even a performance. I find performances to be the most impactful. There are so many other ways to really engage with the art rather than sitting down – you can yell and scream and applaud and really get into the engagement of the thing.

For me, the most impactful artists or the most powerful are also activists. They thread their activism and their art. It’s sometimes subtle. Other times it’s explicit and smacks you in the face.

I think about Hank Willis Thomas, for example. I think about Mickalene Thomas. Even Derrick Adams and Shaun Leonardo. They’re folks who are really imbedding topics in a very complex way.

“Often times immigrant and brown communities capitulate to the European and white aesthetic in America in order to figure out how to commodify their ideas.”

Griot In the Stuy Project By Rasu Jilani, photography by Kwesi Abbensetts

BW:How do people get involved when they want to get more engaged ? What can be some ways to make projects like these accessible outside of the art bubble?

RJ: Look at what’s going on in your neighborhood and who are the activists. Take a second with people who are handing out pamphlets. Sometimes they’re engaging something on a grassroot level that you haven’t seen yet. I remember when the climate march started happening being in Union Square. I was working on a climate project called Holoscenes with Lars Jan and he was building these aquariums, so it was high on my consciousness. I looked at this flier and I remember passing it on to Lars, like, ‘Yo, we need to get involved with this.’ At the time it wasn’t a thing yet, but it was really starting to bubble up.

Holoscenes by Lars Jan, Toronto Promenade, 2014

Taking the time and slowing down and listening to what people have to say around the topic, whether you agree or not. Reflecting and having a dialogue: “I don’t agree with that. That’s cool. Thank you.” But at least you opened the gates for some information to come in. I also think it’s important to be part of community boards or block associations to find out what’s going on locally that impacts your immediate community. It’s something that you can actually have an impact on. Sometimes we look too far ahead, and we look at the president, and if an issue gets to the president it’s probably too late.

Look at your local churches, synagogues, and mosques, because they are usually places for convening around social issues. The Center for Urban Pedagogy, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Brotherhood Sistersol, LES Girls Club, and the Laundromat Project do it on a super grassroots level. I look at the Theater for the Oppressed. The Rubin Foundation. A Blade of Grass. Echoing Green. These are tremendous programs that are open to the public and many people are not aware.

BW:What are you most excited about?

RJ: NEW INC has inspired me to another degree. It made me realize that my work is appreciated and I need to figure out how to put it all together to tell a bigger story. It’s also given me the inspiration and motivation to pass it on to the next generation. Former students of mine, former interns of mine, peers, and the youth from around the way [my neighborhood], to hand them tools. Tools are needed especially now. We’re just a lot of talking heads but there’s not enough tool sharing and methodology sharing.

I’ve been told that this should be a manifesto or methodology shared from my practice. But I think it should be more than just me. There are some peers of mine like Ebony Golden or Chloe Bass, who hold a wealth of information. Dr. Thomas DeFrantz in North Carolina. Even with Stephanie Dinkins is doing with bringing awareness to AI and implicit bias. We can pull resources together and create a manifesto and tools for people in the activist world.

I do think a lot about the idea of hyperlocalism and how you can create a self-sustained and self-reliant and sustainable economy both artistically and financially for a community. I think many times communities look outwards too much and they need to bind and lock-in and then share like nodes in a network.

If a node is not strong enough the signal can’t get there. In order to create a huge and viable circularity network, create a node (or a multitude of nodes) that actually work. Each community can be fortified and centered in their self-reliance so those resources can really flourish and circulate throughout our city. How do we create tools for each node or each community to be fortified with their own self-reliance, whether that be economically, artistically, or culturally?

It’s a very big question to tackle and I want to start at home to figure out what this economic development will look like. Cultural sustainability and cultural preservation within the lens of economy but also within the lens of art.

BW:We’re in another period (post post-postmodern) and it’s all about multiple temporalities. There’s not one art history. There’s not one story. Things are simultaneously global and local. And, bimodal.

RJ: A big question for me is how do I figure out a space for local residents, especially people of color, to generate their ideas and express their culture without the gaze of the dominant society. We all know that experimentation is essential to innovation, but many urban spaces are under-resourced with few institutions that allow for ideas to incubate. Maybe I’m sounding a little ambiguous, but it’s something that I’ve been through enough to know that it’s a real thing. Often times immigrant and brown communities capitulate to the European and white aesthetic in America in order to figure out how to commodify their ideas. I think there are ways to fortify and actualize it in their community.

The other thing is I’ve been thinking about the next evolution of my social sculpting practice: how does one integrate spiritual practices in to the work? Whatever one’s spiritual practice is, how does it ground the artistic in the cultural practice? For me, my practice is a form of gratitude back to the community that made me who I am. And that becomes a spiritual practice of radical generosity.

Griot In the Stuy Project By Rasu Jilani, photography by Kwesi Abbensetts In Photo: Former Assemblywoman, Annette Robinson

When developing his futuristic virtual simulations, Jakob Kudsk Steensen ventures into the real world in search of the organic material that will form the inspirational backbone of his work. The New York-based artist uses the source material from these intense excursions – from rare clay to a certain strain of sediment – coupled with conversations with biologists and ethnographers, and inspiration from ecology-orientated science fiction, to create his vast imaginative virtual worlds inhabited by anthropomorphic creatures. Through his practice, Steensen – originally from Denmark – is concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. Specializing in real-time futuristic simulations of existing ecosystems exhibited as video installations and VR, his aim is to generate a new type of ecological awareness.

Jakob: Originally, I wanted to be an animator, but there was a submission test where you had to draw the same figure 17 times in different expressions and poses, and I knew I couldn’t do it. So I went down the fine arts route instead. However, I didn’t get into the Royal Academy in Denmark – “the” art school in the country - so I spent the year studying social anthropology instead. Prior to that I attended an experimental art school in the city of Aarhus while working in phone sales, cleaning and by parking cars.

“Virtual fits certain ideas about things that can morph and change or things that are networked and collected”

Pando Endo, 2017, Realtime simulation with 4 drone cameras. Pando Endo was made as an art commission for Worm's first online issue, “Refuse: (v)(n)()”: http://www.wormrefuse.org/pandoendo. Photo courtesy of the artist.

BW: Not getting into that school sounds like it worked out for you.

JS: After studying anthropology for one year I spent three years studying art history, and then went to Central Saint Martins in London for a year, after which I returned to Copenhagen to complete my Master’s thesis. That was a bizarre paper on intuition and emotion and digital media. At the end, I went to Spain to make a project about abandoned tourist resorts. I showed that, and I made a living from art from then on.

“I also just want to emphasize that you can use this media to imagine different kinds of landscapes of the future.”

BW: Were there any specific artists that inspired you?

JS: When I was in art school in 2011, Ed Atkins started showing in London. I thought his work was really interesting. He’s more like a writer using the virtual as his avatar, as part of his writing. That inspired me a lot.

JS: Paintings based on natural history. Alongside all of this, I’d also been modifying and playing games, hanging out with people building games in 3D. I was painting virtual ecosystems, and drawing people on the bus and their expressions and phones. I have 300 tiny ink drawings of people on their phones.

BW: Can you talk a little bit about how you got to the work that you’re doing today, which is very much based on both virtual and ecological ideas?

JS: Virtual fits certain ideas about things that can morph and change or things that are networked and collected. People who do animation really well in games have studied something else as well – observed bodies, humans, plants, landscapes, animals. They know all the muscles and the physics. You have an element of observation when you work with high-level simulations in animation. In Aquaphobia for example, I discovered a type of red clay in the soil. I ordered it to my studio to photograph to use as texture. I go on long excursions to landscapes.

BW: You were photographing moss trees down in Atlanta recently.

JS: I’m fascinated by the concept of a swamp right now, because the swamp is many species and DNAs. If you throw anything in these ecosystems, for example, in Florida, it would just spread. The idea of living in a swamp future and everything combining to create new kinds of structures and relationships of power is really interesting. I think about all those things when I build work. It’s not always what the audience thinks of right away when they see it, but the process is very important in terms of ending at a result.

BW: The human footprint on nature and our relationship through technology to the natural world seem like big concepts in your work.

JS: In Aquaphobia, you start in a room surrounded by electron microscopes of water microbes. Those are actual photographs around you. I put them in there because I’m thinking about some camera that went through technology from your eye, through lenses to see something, somewhere, but all of a sudden it’s on a one-to-one human scale. It’s an extension of senses and how you perceive things around you. Those are quite common concepts. I try to think about all these scenes and faces in my landscapes in between something that feels like you’re still within the human body.

BW: How does your process of discovery inform your work?

JS: When I go on excursions, I usually spend two months in some landscape, and I research the geological and cultural history, maybe speak to a biologist. Based on that, I arrive at some core concept to explore within that specific entire landscape. That core concept is then reflected in each design principle, and the total layout, the materials used, pace, speed, color, everything is surrounding a simple concept. I approach the landscape really open, just looking at different perspectives. And then something there is relevant in terms of imagining some different future structures.

BW: What are the landscapes that you’re most drawn to? Or does it start with a conceptual idea and then you find the right landscape?

JS: It depends on conversations with institutions or places interested in my approach. I have certain ways of working and thinking, and then there are places that might find that applicable, to find some natural conversation. I want to let it evolve through the process. Usually I start with a grand implication and everything’s written down, but once I go, if I get an idea, I just fully accept it and make it. There’s a lot of chaos once I’m in the process of making.

BW: So, the work is largely site-specific or site-derived?

JS: Yeah, otherwise I’m not inspired to make it. Every single plant and rock and the soil you see is derived from something that has, at some point, been in that landscape.

In this one landscape, in Aquaphobia, there are five rooms. I interviewed a psychologist that treats people who fear water, and each of those five locations reflects different steps [of that treatment]. So the first step is to rethink what the organic matter of water is. The first one was just microbes all around you.

Then, the next one is to dip your toes in water, so the next room is kind of muddy. The narrator is saying, “Look down at your feet and see them inch into the mud.” And then you go through a post-modern concrete tunnel up to the park that’s an archeological site. This water blob is talking about why you keep digging in your mutual past, as if you were never mutually exclusive and then it grows stronger and bigger, until you have to be on your own in the end of this piece.

BW: How do you theorize the work?

JS: I think it’s about being together with an understanding of some of these elements and histories and landscapes in ways that are pretty hard to explain. It’s also based on feelings, how you react to the different elements. I’m so elaborate in my pieces. I spend four or five months making each one, including research. If I don’t have that element to it, I don’t feel inspired. I don’t want to sit in my studio and just build it. I can’t.

It also comes from all the representations we have of the future and VR and digital media, much of which is commercially based. I want to emphasize that you can use this media to imagine different kinds of landscapes of the future, if you dare. On its own, it’s enough motivation for me, especially when I present this work and do talks at a university, and I say that to students. I feel like there’s some interest or glow in their eyes. You can embrace this media on a very human level, just like having a conversation or listening to music. I mix it all together.

BW: How do you think about your materials in connection to gaming companies and game engines used for commercial means? In a way, you are subverting the use of these game technologies.

JS: I played a lot of games and used these tools when I was growing up, so it feels natural, but I’m also very inspired and fascinated by the methods of building massive wealth production, like games where there are 200 people working for four years. Or you see something that has sold 12 million copies. All of those are just guns and shooters and entertainment, but I think the method itself is fascinating, and I think there’s something deeply poetic in that way of making work.

I’m interested in those methods, but also in developing totally different content that perhaps comes from drawing or painting. I think of how you perceive space, color, senses, and I play with them. If I hadn’t grown up with 3D games, I’d probably be building some kind of installation.

BW: Your studio feels like an ingestion process filled with both digital and raw materials fueling the work.

JS: I have organic material in there sometimes and other times I feel like building a costume. I film myself in the studio in these costumes and perform. The studio is a safe space to me where I can do all that.

I made this virtual plant that I called Pando Endo based on an aspen colony of clonal trees in Santa Fe. There are 40,000 trees, 80,000 years old, and it’s one organism. Each tree is genetically identical to the next because they’re all connected. We think of it as trees in a forest, but it’s actually more like a mushroom. It’s one thing. I went and photographed different groups of trees and textures, and then I built a set up for my computer that builds the plant dynamically for me based on variables and 30 photographs.

The pure materiality of it starts to become interesting to me. I feel like this kind of self-reference with costumes and fantasies and sci-fi dimensions are subjects I’m working through, approaching something that’s more about a pure mix of materiality – like collaborations with other’s perspective, such as a biologist‘s, trying to take their world, their feelings about something, and blow it out to some huge scale.

Pando Endo, 2017, Realtime simulation with 4 drone cameras. Pando Endo was made as an art commission for Worm's first online issue, “Refuse: (v)(n)(-)”: http://www.wormrefuse.org/pandoendo. Photo courtesy of the artist

BW: It reminds me of so many things – like personas, dressing up as personas, which little kids do so often. They immediately jump to another character and completely embody it.

How does writing influence your work?

JS: During these excursions I go on, I spend a lot of time on my own, in my mind. In my VR works, when you walk around in the worlds, there’s no cut – it’s just one long sequence. That’s the feeling I get when I read literature: Your mind journeying through some kind of place or landscape.

When I’m in the middle of producing a piece, I read a lot of books to be in that world. Literature is – for my interest – the most progressive discipline, more than films or games. “Frankenstein” was written a long time ago, and that’s science, body modification, love, humanity, death, and AI, which we’re just trying to grasp now. The books behind “Blade Runner” go way back. And now you have these books on eco sci-fi that are super-progressive. Literature and fiction is a big inspiration.

BW: What’s next for you?

JS: I don’t want to say too much, but I’m trying to build an ecosystem that’s on a warehouse-scale, where all the different things are alive, like VR/AR installations, light refractions and sculptures, and then try to work with these specific biological regions, some laboratories.

BW: A large-scale production like a trilogy?

JS: If I still have this feeling of raw intuition and imagination when I do a project, I have to obey it, but with this warehouse scale project, it became more about the landscape and the full on materials and the histories. That was really rewarding and interesting to work with. So that might be a direction I go on. I think there are more options for collaboration with institutions because then it’s not just about my fantasy of a landscape.

I think the hardest thing for me as an artist is there’s an economy in art where things need to be clarified intellectually, like discourse, to be branded and sold to museums. I think my work makes sense to people when they experience it, but it’s hard to summarize all these aspects into something short or specific.

BW: That’s probably one of the strengths of your work is that it’s not easy to define or codify. But you’re an artist’s artist for VR in that regard.

JS: That’s also my approach to science, to technology, to everything. It’s just as much a feeling people have about ecology or destruction in relation to themselves. Those are elements that I think about.

Pando Endo, 2017, Realtime simulation with 4 drone cameras. Pando Endo was made as an art commission for Worm's first online issue, “Refuse: (v)(n)(-)”: http://www.wormrefuse.org/pandoendo. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Bio:

Jakob Kudsk has recently exhibited at Jepson Center for the Arts, Time Square for the Midnight Moment, at Carnegie Museum of Art, The Moving Image Fair, NYC, MAXXI, WIRED annual conference, FRIEZE in London, Podium in Oslo, Ok Corral in Copenhagen, 86 Project Space, Brooklyn, Sleep Center, Chinatown and at London Science Museum. As an art director on the VR project TREE VR, made with The Rainforest Alliance and NEW REALITY CO, Steensen’s has shown at Sundance and TriBeCa film festival. His work has been featured in MOUSSE Magazine, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Spike Art Quarterly, ARTREPORT, Politiken, Information, Worm, NEO2, VICE, NY Times, WIRED and TSOEG. He has received awards from the Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation, and Lumen Arts Price. He has been artist in residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, AADK, Centra Negra, MASS MoCA, BRIC and Mana Contemporary.

Jonathan Monaghan works across print, sculpture, and video installation. His work challenges the boundaries between the real, the imagined, and virtual. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from science fiction to Baroque architecture, he creates bizarre, yet compelling narratives and imagery with the same high-end technology used in Hollywood or by video game designers.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at bitforms gallery in New York, Spazio Ridotto in Venice, and Market Gallery in Glasgow. Group exhibitions include New Frontiers at the Sundance Film Festival, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Postmasters Gallery. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, VICE, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and The Village Voice.

Monaghan received his BFA from the New York Institute of Technology in 2008 and his MFA from the University of Maryland in 2011. Biography courtesy of bitforms gallery.

Brett Wallace: What is your origin story and what inspired to start creating art?

Jonathan Monaghan: I grew up in Rockaway Beach in Queens, and it’s a wonderful place because if you look out one window you see the Manhattan skyline. And if you look out another window you see the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve always identified strongly with New York City, and I made some work recently that I think deals a little bit with the visual fabric of the city. It was traditionally an Irish Catholic enclave too, so sometimes that comes into my work as well.

I grew up in one of these huge Robert Moses-era an apartment projects. We had a beach, but there were not many outdoor activities that you do when you grow up in an apartment building. So, I was always drawn to video games and online or imaginative virtual worlds.

BW: There appear to be some conceptual underpinnings around the transformation of the urban center in your work. What are some of ideas underpinning your recent work?

JM: I think the work definitely tries to confront the aesthetics of modern material desire through architecture. And, I think what the work is trying to do is navigate through a type of contemporary myth and peel back the veneers that kind of cover up desire, power and wealth. I try and do this using absurdity and using subversive humor. So, with the works in Disco Beast for instance, I began looking at the mythology of the unicorn. The unicorn is this kind of otherworldly, mystical, magical beast. It’s also associated with purity in a way. But, it also has this history of something that’s highly desired and sought after. People would always try and find the unicorn or hunt the unicorn. So, it has the kind of darker history associated with this kind of imperialistic desire.

“The works are of these dehumanized spaces and the animals that populate my films and sculptures often stand in for people in the modern contemporary experience.”

I kind of appropriated the unicorn as this mythological symbol but created a modern myth in a way. In the video, we see the unicorn juxtaposed with these discordant spaces, like a Starbucks or this never-ending abandoned mall. And it creates a discordance, which I think is part of the subversive humor. The works are trying to think about what we’re developing in this hyper-capitalist era. And, how that reflects on values and desires of a society. It’s not meant to be overly critical or prescriptive, but by subverting and dealing with a lot of that imagery, maybe we could unpack what it means and what’s behind it.

BW: I definitely took away inferences of the hyper-capitalistic, packaged, refined branding of architectural spaces that we see today. There was another reading I had too, which is around the concept of the mundane, the everyday, through the uncut, ongoing loop of voyeuristic activity. Is that something of interest?

JM: Yeah, the unicorn is something that’s kind of the opposite of that. So, I was trying to create a contrast, and the unicorn comes back to life in a Starbucks bathroom, which is just kind of this strange thing. It just seems like so many people, whenever we have to go to the bathroom we go to a Starbucks bathroom. So, it’s kind of a funny place to have this magical kind of disco resurrection thing going on. But yes, you’re right. The works are on continuous loops, and there are no cuts or edits, and there’s no real start or stop. And, so we are witnessing these endless cycles that keep repeating. It’s kind of voyeuristic, almost like we’re just visiting these spaces, and the creatures are kind of stuck in this endless loop cycle.

“I think the media industry also needs the artist’s voice as a way to compete with the entertainment and industrial complex that has developed these tools”

BW: I think that one of the other interesting things that I took away from the show is there’s also this exchange between the digital and physical – not only in the actual production of the work – but the idea of transposing these different elements together. Can you talk a little bit about the use of the materials and objects?

JM: Well, I’m very interested in the aesthetics of wealth and power. And, for instance with the gold and porcelain piece, we see a unicorn, and he’s surrounded by a TSA checkpoint. So, it references a number of historical artworks and aesthetics from the baroque era – the pure white porcelain and the gold have an aristocratic association. And it’s also referencing a famous tapestry that’s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Cloisters called The Unicorn in Captivity, where we see a medieval tapestry with a unicorn trapped in a fence.

The piece references that and it’s a way to unpack what’s behind those aesthetics. And additionally, I’ve also worked with marble as well. But what’s interesting is I always use digital fabrication in this process, so really all of the sculptures come out of the same virtual space that I have developed the films in. Same with the prints as well. So, all of my work is connected by this virtual space, where everything is designed.

I also like making that connection between modern aesthetics of wealth and power and historical ones from western history. And there’s a lot of violence and imperialism associated with that era. And these things still play out today, but I guess I’m partially trying to see where they’re coming from, how they play out today by subverting these modern, corporate aesthetics.

BW: It’s not a huge leap to also think of the connotation of Trump Tower where everything’s painted gold.

JM: It was very much in my mind when I was making these things. In fact, some of the historical architecture I used was from the St. Regis Hotel, which is across the street from the Trump Tower, which was an early 20th century luxury hotel built by the Astor’s, from another era of ostentatious wealth. There’s something about that gold surface that has this sinister quality to it. It’s desirable, but then there’s something sinister and dark associated with it. So, I think the work is trying to deal with that.

And we saw with the Starbucks logo that was inverted. It was turned with this kind of black fur coming out of it, this horse-hair-like fur. So, it turned it into something kind of organic and sinister. And, then we also see in the Police State Condo series these spikey gold forms – almost like mouths that are opening. And, so it’s something that’s seductive, and it draws you in, just like the films, but then it makes you a little bit uncomfortable after it draws you in.

BW: Could you talk about sense of speculation and space/time in the work?

JM: I think the work is more speculative about the present than about the future. I think of the works as a slightly different version of our reality. There are no people. The works depict dehumanized spaces and the animals that do populate my films and sculptures often stand in for people in the modern contemporary experience. So, for instance the unicorn is entrapped in this security state, and I think that’s very much a metaphor for our society today in the digital age.

BW: Let’s also talk about the Fabergé exhibition that you have at the Walters?

JM: I created a series of work called After Fabergé in 2015, and I exhibited the works initially at bitforms Gallery. And, for me the Fabergé egg has always been this symbol of high desire and status. As part of our cultural lexicon, we see it pop up in popular culture a lot. And I wanted to take that as a symbol and subvert it and redesign it for the digital age in a way. So, the works are large scale photographic prints created using 3D modeling and animation software. And, the works appropriate some of the various original Fabergé eggs but placed modern accouterments of the digital age, whether it’s loading cursors or a Starbucks.

The works come across sometimes looking like spaceships or weird alien creatures. They have a conflation of different things to create these ambiguous forms. At times, they look like they could be a commercial product. The works are on exhibit right now at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The Walters Art Museum has two of the original Fabergé eggs in its collection, and they mounted a show about Fabergé and the Russian Czars, the dynasty, and my prints are on display right next to that show.

It’s up until next summer. And it’s really exciting. It’s the first time I’ve been able to exhibit my work alongside historical artworks. I use historical artworks as a framework in my practice. So being able to exhibit them alongside the originals is something very exciting and unique, and I think it creates an even more kind of challenging experience for the viewer to look at these originals and think about their history and then to look at my pieces.

BW: The craftsmanship on the eggs is just extraordinary. How did you take the level of detail (and work) into account in re-imagining them?

JM: Yeah, those eggs had an incredible level of craftsmanship, and they definitely come from a time of a completely different type of labor. And the digital age has a totally different type of labor involved. And you’re talking about lots of apprentices and lots of people working very long hours, probably for little pay, to make these precious little items, but the results are incredible from a visual standpoint. These tiny little eggs have multitudes of layers of detail. You go up close to them, and it’s just the detail never ends. I mean they’re incredible.

And I was drawn to that aesthetically as well. The works that I created try and maintain a kind of similar level of detail in the way you can step back and look at the works, but then you go up really close to the prints, and the details are accentuated. You could see tiny little reflections and see tiny little elements. And, the digital software lends itself to that process, in a way, because these objects are created virtually. When they’re presented, the rendering software I use allows you to create these incredibly detailed images.

So, there’s definitely a level of craft and detail that carries over into my work as well because I have to place all those elements. I placed that satellite dish. I determined the reflections. I placed these baroque elements or these pieces of furniture. There’s a Starbucks store in one of the eggs, and I placed all the little mugs and things hanging on the shelves, and I had to create the menu items and all that stuff. So, I fabricated all of that, much like a set designer would or somebody constructing a doll house or something in the virtual space. You could go up close and stand right in front of the print and see all those tiny details.

“I think artists must adopt and leverage these tools because they’re so powerful, but at the same time, I think the media industry also needs the artist’s voice.”

BW: As an artist who has mastered 3D modeling software, how do you think about how the methods and materials align to the conceptual production of the work?

JM: What I’m doing is I’m appropriating tools and techniques that are designed for commercial uses. So, the animation software is designed to make commercials or films or animated entertainment. They have a much more specific commercial function. And I’m appropriating those tools and techniques but for a more intellectual or contemplative end. And it’s a similar way with the digital fabrication process.

These digital fabrication processes, 3D printing, CNC milling, etc., are designed for, or initially developed at least for, aerospace or engineering or other kinds of large scale industrial processes. So, being an artist I’m able to appropriate some of those tools and techniques but for different means. A lot of it is experimenting, and a lot of it is referencing these historical artworks. So, the decision comes from aesthetic choices but also what is going to help portray this narrative I’m developing.

BW: I found Alan Warburton’s essay, Goodbye Uncanny Valley, timely and insightful. This supports your point of leveraging these tools and systems but not within a studio like Pixar but actually leveraging them to push the frontier, build new things.

JM: Well, they’re so powerful, you can’t just leave them. I think artists must adopt and leverage these tools because they’re so powerful, but at the same time, I think the media industry also needs the artist’s voice as a way to compete with the entertainment and industrial complex that has developed these tools. Now we are seeing many artists use 3D software, and I think it’s a good thing because we’re seeing new possibilities, and we’re seeing different stories and narratives that aren’t told by the mainstream commercial media.

We’re seeing artists taking ownership of these very powerful creative tools. I began using 3D software back when I was 15 or 16, and I began developing images for no real reason. I was interested in photorealism, being able to create something that appeared like a photo. So, I had this strong desire to create images that were completely computer generated but could pass as a real photo.

And I just began doing this for no reason. I didn’t know anything about art at the time and I think it was this excitement that you could create anything. Once you have the software, theoretically, you could make anything. You could make a film. There’s nothing that can’t be done with this software, and I think that was something really exciting to me, even as a 16-year-old kid playing around with that stuff.

Mattia Casalegno is an Italian interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. His multidisciplinary work is influenced by both post-conceptualism and digital art, and has been defined as relational, immersive, and participatory. His practice explores the effects new media have on our societies, investigating the relationships between technology, the objects we create, our subjectivities, and the modes in which these relations unfold into each other.

Brett: What is the origin of your practice?

Mattia: I started doing visuals in rave parties in Rome, in the late '90s. What was interesting to me at that time was not contemporary art but the electronic music scene. With a friend of mine, Giovanni D’Aloia, I had co-founded a collective called Kinotek, and we were doing a lot of experimental projects between sounds and visuals. That was the moment when video-projectors and computers were starting to get small and cheap, so we were carrying those around in parties and VJing events. That was fun. It was the first time I was pretty much free to experiment, and to do things that were not being done.

“We were playing a lot with this idea of how you can interchange the languages of audio and visuals into creating certain aesthetic experiences”

BW: Who or what influenced you early on?

MC: I was very much into video art and early net art. My heroes were Otolab, an experimental audio-visual group based in Milan, Oginoknaus in Florence, and the minimal live-media stuff that was coming from Berlin. There was an early VJing European scene, with collectives and groups from Spain, UK, Germany. It was a very active period.

We were mostly participating to media arts and electronic music festivals in Italy and Europe. That was my biggest influence – and, of course, all the big video artists of the time – but what I was really into was my peers’ work.

With Kinotek we were not just doing visuals but experimenting in many different directions. In 2003, With Enzo Varriale -a researcher in neuropsychology at the University in Rome- we premiered a live media performance based on the visualization of hundreds of audio recordings based on EEG (Encephalographic Data) - the ‘sound’ that brains emit, cfr.). Our interests at that time were very much based on science and technology.

It was very much a time when everybody was starting to have a laptop, but computers and graphic cards were not that powerful yet. The fastest and cheapest thing was audio and visuals, and we were into this idea of how you can interchange the languages of audio and video and creating something different which is the sum of the two languages.

After several years, by the mid ‘00, I was VJing as a full-time job, doing clubs every week. It started to be a really serialized activity, not that fun after all. One time, for a festival in Belgium, I made a sort of VJing jukebox, an interactive kiosk where the audience would use different sliders to choose the style of visuals by themselves, and a software would then play visuals in the room on the beat, mixing the content based on the live audio and the style chosen: techno VJing, electro vying, ambient, chill vying, etc. etc. Basically that's where I stopped. After awhile, I started to become really interested in materiality.

BW: Looking around the studio, I am seeing the anti-VR headset based on some S&M influences. I also see 3D-printed facial masks and a variety of different bound monitors. Can you talk about some of the conceptual underpinnings of these ideas?

MC: My work is very sensorial, I’m very interested in physicality. Lately I'm working on what I call “micro-environments”, sort of immersive experiences, very much how I would do with audiovisual installations, but more intimate.

MC: In collaboration with the LA-based design studio Metonym, I designed a series of masks lined with green-leaf volatiles (the chemical released by grass just after it has been cut) that envelops the user in darkness. The mask replays the sound of your own breathing back with a slight delay -when you breath out you hear yourself breathing in, and vice versa.

I’m really fascinated by the relationships between memory and the olfactory. The smell of fresh-cut grass recalls a primordial memory related to the outdoors and nature, who every child has engrained in themselves. The twist is that the chemicals that the plants emit when they are been cut, is actually a distress signal communicating danger and pain to the other plants nearby. So what is nowadays linked to a memory of nature for most humans, is actually pain for nature.

At the beginning the masks were lined with actual fresh sod, that I would get straight from Home Depot. One day I bought a big patch of sod, brought to my studio and started to play with it. My original idea was to create an entire room, but then I thought, maybe I should do the opposite. Instead of creating a space for people to move, let’s create a really constrictive, enclosed, sort of non-space.

BW: Which is the antithesis of both VR, which is further away from reality.

MC: Virtual Reality is all about the eyes, the sight. But when you cut one sense off, the other ones are more receptive. That’s what interesting to me. It's the same thing when you tie people.

BW: Can you talk about the collaboration with the Japanese bondage artist? It's really interesting and fits in also with this idea of the sensory.

MC: I was researching a lot the aesthetics of bondage. I like this idea of tying down some sort of freedom in order to induce a heightened state of awareness. You're tied to your entire life. I like that state of mind, where you feel in danger. Your body is more open, in a way. It's that fine line between the possibility of death – the impossibility of movement – and freedom.

Anyways, I was working on these kinds of ideas, and started to literally tie objects, like big TV screens, 50-65 inches. At that time I was planning a relatively large-scale installation for an art space in Florida, and I wanted to work with the particular style of Kinbaku, which is the Japanese version of the Western idea of bondage. The quality of the work, the artists working in that kind of medium was amazing to me. Soon I realized that I will never get to that level of mastery, so I started to reach out to people in online BDSM communities. It was there that I met Alex R, a real artist in his own way. He’s a system engineer by day and rope artist for the porno industry by night, and has an immense experience with this art form, which is based on trust and mutual respect. It made me think how everybody has so many personalities within. I love to collaborate with people in my projects. I've worked with musicians, chefs, neuroscientists, architects, astrophysicists, and everybody brings with him the world in which he operates.

MC: In early 2010 I was living in LA and working as studio manager for Lita Albuquerque, a dear friend and great artist who’s been very instrumental to my practice. She was asked to participate in a festival at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, and we started a conversation with John Good, an astrophysicist working at the Exoplanet Science Institute, the lab at Caltech that is studying and categorizing the new planets that in the last five years or so are been discovered outside of our solar system.

The lab is managing a huge repository of data about these planets: the speed at which they are orbiting their stars, their masses, temperature, chemical composition, etc. We ended up making a durational live-media performance in collaboration with the LA Master Chorale, that included a live visualization of the 3500 confirmed exoplanets.

The piece started at midnight, lasted 4 hours and was staged on the bridge at the observatory, which is the bridge that Einstein walked to meet Hubble, who in the ‘50 was the first to see that the universe was expanding. Einstein couldn't believe it because for him the universe was infinite. In his mind, everything was perfect and static. So he went there, to talk with Hubble, and here there's this picture on the bridge with Hubble all happy, and Einstein making a frown.

BW: What does it mean to you to have an anti-VR experience, or to bound a screen in a way to use materiality with the digital?

MC: It might be a statement on the way we're living, on the relationship we have with technology. In the end, I’m interested in talking about what we do with technology – how we change with it.

The physical bounding of a screen can also be seen that way, where you just want to keep this thing in control. I grew up with computers and for me the digital is easy, but at the end it always ends up being in the physical world anyway. Even the most immaterial digital experience has always a real, physical side to it. And the hard fact is that everything falls down in the end.

Whenever you enter something in a digital space, everything looks amazing, everything is floating, shiny, and perfect. Then gravity comes in. I’d spend all this time designing perfect images, and the computer was like, yeah, let's do this. But then when you have to build it, or install it, or make it working consistently, that’s where the real problems kick in.

BW: Your studio is organized based on sort of growth cycles. Can you talk about how you're thinking about your own process – the studio work as an actual artwork, or theorizing the studio process?

MC: I'm not a very systematic person. So I figured out that maybe it might help to have a system that I can impose on myself, so I can stick to a method. I looked a lot into how small businesses or companies run their businesses. What is interesting is – or at least for me, what is useful - is not necessarily having a final product, but a system where ideas and solutions are constantly fed back in the creative process. So I figured out a way to organize all the activities of my studios in areas or “stages”, based on the stages of the agricultural cycle.

There is a stage where I basically plant my ideas, as if they were seeds. That’s the prototyping phase, the sort of R&D section of my studio, where I test processes, materials, technologies, possibilities.

Then, when a project is going to happen, that's the production phase. That's where you start to produce things - an installation, an experience, an object, a situation - that’s when a seed grows and evolves into form.

Then comes the harvesting phase, when you get the fruits of your work. What’s interesting is that during harvest, you get also the new seeds to plant for the next year, and so a project is not just complete, but it sort of goes back into the seeding step, where you keep on researching and experimenting with the ideas you've previously actualized.

BW: So, it's like integrating a formal R&D process into the studio?

MC: Yeah. And also, before you plant something, you usually prep your soil to create the best conditions for something to become a reality. This is the fourth stage of my studio operations. That’s when I try getting people involved, reach out to peers, to press, when I organize studio visits, workshops, etc.

BW: The process and the materiality seem to really matter for you. It's about going through the steps.

MC: Yes. it’s about following a cyclical methodology. It’s about recirculate energy and materials in the system. I’m always been fascinated by cyclicality and repetition. One of my favorite piece I made operates in a similar circular way. It’s a scary, weird machine that endlessly produces an edible thing, over and over again.

BW: What was it producing?

MC: It's basically baking a piece of bread that looks like a sacramental host, and stamping a logo on it. It's a sort of machine that feeds you. When I came up with the idea, six or seven years ago, I was also thinking about the idea of automatization itself. I started to think of a certain large-scale machine that would automate a process. At that point, the design of the process was more important than the final product. Duchamp would call it a ’bachelor machine’, a machine that is not producing anything useful.

The title of the piece is "RBSC”, which is based on the name of an enzyme that plants use during the photosynthesis cycle to produce energy from oxygen and sunlight. It’s the most common enzyme on the planet, and a sort of very “slow” enzyme, being evolved when the atmosphere was full of CO2.

There is a big effort in biotechnology to design a “faster” version of it, so that we can sort of keep on dumping carbon dioxyde in the air, in the hope that our new engineered, faster plants will absorb more of our waste.

BW: It's great. I really love it. It reminded me of the Eucharist, as well.

MC: Yes. With the advent of the rite of the Eucharist it was the first time we used a symbol for sacrifice instead of a real animal, or living thing. It was completely detached from nature. That was the very moment when we disconnected with the sacrificial aspect of nature.

BW: Also, what I find interesting in the machinic there is no body, no whole; only parts.

MC: Only desiring machines, body without organs. After the disconnection from nature, desire is not coming from a lack of something, but out of production.

In the ”Symposium" Plato talks about desire as something that you are missing and aspire to. I desire my lover. I desire food. I desire something I don't have. But then, after Freud, we started to think about desire not as something you are missing, but as a process concatenating desiring machines through bodies and things.

My machine is a kind of nothing in a way, because you need that symbol to be in yourself. That symbol is this desire of transforming your environment in such egotistic and shortsighted ways. We might rationally conceive that we are going towards destruction, but we can’t escape to make ours what is outside of ourselves.

Claire Lieberman: An excursion to pour plaster casts on the beach of Lake Michigan when I was in an art class at 4 or 5 comes to mind. Fresh air, warm sand, and the ambient sound of waves set an immersive stage for creativity. Ever since, I’ve wanted to put my whole body into making. The Boston Museum School, where I studied, was a very conceptual program. So I’ve always paired two urges by infusing the intimacy of process with corroboratory ideation.

BW: Could you talk about what inspired your latest body of work UDBO Playground (Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects)? Are you interested in the sublime as a way to describe nature?

CL: I am interested in the sublime, but paired with quirkiness—how tactile engagement and lush visuality bump into historical association. By that I mean sculptural tradition and the way stone has been used to render greatness. This show fools around with exchanges of play and power by looking at how violence in contemporary culture can be rendered with associative imagery of attraction and repulsion. I chose a game-like configuration to explore the relationship between playing and sublimated aggression. As you move in and about the individual sculptures, there is a kinetic sense, like that in a video game. The sculptures in black marble are a combination of exquisite and brash— a re-formation of classical sculpture through fleshier images of danger. Such a notion of the sublime expands the concept of beauty to include dissonance.

BW: In the recent show, there are glass guns and fruit modeled out of polished black marble. What are the conceptual ideas underpinning this work? Contradiction seems to be consistent in the object / material relationship in this work - is that of interest to you? How important is symbolism in your work?

CL: I began this body of work after the last election, which was disturbing because the campaign had portended impending chaos. This ensemble of pieces is partly a reaction to that sense, and they are meant to be direct, even harsh—if also reflective, smooth, refined. I am probing the aesthetics of violence as a way of understanding conflict—an expansive topic.

The glass guns in this show are part of a series beginning with literal representations of handguns that transform into space-age toy guns that are increasingly phantasmagoric. To me, a toy gun is an icon that embodies the conflict between reality and fantasy in the mind of a child, and in American culture in general.

The idea of fruit that you responded to comes out of pondering these objects as stand-ins for the body. A melon as a symbol is moist, sweet, fertile. The form is in the vicinity of a grenade—but so much the opposite. It’s true that juxtaposition is an important underlying thread: one “grenade” is inscribed with flowers. In my dreams, this is a peace and love show!

BW: Material use and sensitivity how materials transform objects seems to be core to your work. Why did you choose the materials you did here?

With the black marble pieces, the stone is heavy, immobile, a marked contrast with disposable playthings they represent. A grenade in black marble rendered as a fleshy form is not only dense, shiny, and dark, but luscious and precious as well. The shape shifts from a literal representation of a grenade to a sensual, disarming form.

The glass gun series is called Ice Guns, and grew out of an earlier video that showed toy guns cast in ice that gradually melting on hot pavement and recollections of space guns and water pistols. Using glass is a way to capture that fluidity—I’ve said before, I’d like to cast the guns in ice, let it melt away, and cast the melting. That’s the feeling I’m trying to capture. These guns are transparent, fragile, even delicate. As with the fleshy grenades, the fragility of the guns operates reflexively: the object and the material are intertwined, each emphasizing but also destabilizing the other.

BW: Could you talk about your previous use of materials such as the works with Jell-0 and with the Brown Bear?

CL: Flashes of humor and sensuality come together when stone is situated next to what I would call its alter-ego, Jell-O. In my multimedia projects, lucent gelatin shapes are duplicated from carved marble elements. It’s no surprise that commercial “ballistic gelatin” is used to measure the impact of bullets on the body. The Jell-O components—flimsy, sticky, silly—are usually disrupted either physically (for example, by a foot stepping on them) or by time, as they wither and shrink. The use of Jell-O also evokes the interior of the physical self. As the Jell-O is traversed or as it dissolves, it suggests the bodily experience of violence. In one piece, the image of Jell-O shaped into water balloons refers to collective memories of early childhood, where aggression is repressed but still experienced in good-natured fun. Jell-O also tickles the argument between art and life, as playing with food is an eternal no. By encountering art, nature, and childhood memories through real, yet chimerical and fantastical objects, the viewer forms connections between their notions of nurture and eventual attitudes toward nature.

As for Brown Bear, there is a softness in children’s playthings. Stuffed animals are stand-ins for our corporeal state. They are meant to be held and hugged. In a video sequence from one of my earlier projects, imagined furry friends set out on a quest. They have misguided notions of power and control and are ready, even hoping, for trouble. But what they find is a surreal frenzy of unimagined and ubiquitous collapse.

BW: Who are some of the artists (or people, things, objects, experiences) that have influenced your practice?

CL: I’m attracted to films with gorgeous, persistent stillness that is punctuated by unexpected moments of intensity. For example, an early Herzog film, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, which is also a useful cautionary tale. I remember Wim Wenders’s three-hour, black and white Kings of the Road more for the endless stretches of highway than for its set of smaller narratives.

Mid-century space guns were, of course, the starting point for the toy guns. They ricochet between nostalgia (for a concocted version of times gone by) and observations of actual weaponry which in the past was highly decorated. Perhaps adding a splash of friskiness. I implicate myself – I played with water pistols as a kid too.

Claire Lieberman, GRENADE WITH FLOWERS, black marble, 2017.

The artist's current show at Massey Lyuben gallery in New York runs until November 11th. The press release is here.

Steven Warwick and I sat down for a conversation in Chelsea before his reading of “Fear Indexing the X-Files” at Printed Matter, co-written by Nora Khan. Steven recently opened a show, Elevate to Mezzanine (E-M) at Issue Project Room and taking place at Secret Project Robot with DeForrest Brown Jr. Part art installation, part club, part conceptual department store, the show includes a custom sound design piece, stage and set, many paintings and a performance. In this show, Warwick performed selections of Nadir, his recent mixtape while team members in E-M uniforms passed out a Look Book/ Journal with images and short texts about modern intimacy or rather the lack of, related to the installation.. The work explores precarity in multiple dimensions, the pressures and disenfranchisement of wage labor and millennial culture.

Steven: I was always interested in art. As a teenager, I thought of making it. When I was about 17, I got into film heavily. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was studying film in the film program at art school. Then, they closed the faculty and tried to merge us into fine art. I was really annoyed at that. I went to an art school nearby and then I was just in fine arts, suddenly.

I'd done a semester of film, so I knew how to make film. I knew how to technically cut film or do Super 8 or 16mm. They had a Steenbeck at the school. I just started to make films, really. The school was quite an old-school polytechnic, where they would just be like, don't paint. Victor Burgin used to teach there – people like that. You had that kind of influence hanging over there.

"I make paintings or sculptures more as props, so they interact with each other. It's very important for me to have bodies in space interacting with the objects and soundtrack"

Steven Warwick performing as Heatsick

BW: Was there a certain group of filmmakers who inspired you?

SW: Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one filmmaker I was into when I was 17. It was mainly the German filmmakers who inspired me. I'm kind of a bit over them now. It's very much a product of its time, and I respect that, but I don't think those films could really be made now, on many levels. I'm the kind of guy who just really likes to research things. If I'm into one person, I'll find out their influences and just go off. I grew up in a small town, even though my family is from London. For me, I was bored out of my mind. I would just go for it. I have a strong passion for finding out things. I want to connect the dots.

BW: How did film influence how think about space?

SW: I still think in terms of a filmmaker. I still have scenes or a stage. It's very important. I make paintings or sculptures more as props, so they interact with each other. It's very important for me to have bodies in space interacting with the objects and soundtrack. On the stage, it was very important to me that there was a strong visual element of someone reclining on the bed, reading – these kinds of things. They're all kind of referential, or inter-referential, I guess. Then you've got the projections on the back. It's one of these very flat images, like you could be in a store.

BW: One of ideas that most interested me was how the work traversed across what appeared to be architectural consumer space to dance space to art space and back again. One could read it as all those things.

SW: I guess it's all dictated as public space, but not really public – but bodies inhabit them and have some kind of financial, monetary value to them.

Steven Warwick’s Snapcast video for the song ‘CTFO’ (aka chill the fuck out), after his release of the album, Nadir (PAN, 2016). This was shot on his iPhone in a mall.

BW: They're all spaces where we consume things.

SW: They're spaces where you consume. If you think in terms of posing, as well – like posing in the club, which I think is very important. It's related to cruising or voguing, this thing of giving off codes. That's what I like about fashion. For me, it's like watching "The Simpsons" or something. A child could watch it, or an adult could watch it, and there are more levels.

I spend a lot of time watching things without the framework. You can enjoy it and have a sense of what it is, but if you also know the extra parts, it doesn't hurt. It's okay to know what the rules are so you can play with them. Whilst I feel it's important, especially now more than ever, to create spaces where people can feel comfortable, and that is something I try to do, I am skeptical when people talk about [queer] space or safe spaces, as I'm not sure they exist after the Pulse shootings. I'm a very critical person who happens to be gay. It doesn't explicitly form my work but it does subtly inhabit it. I'm hyper aware of the contradiction of a very rigid system of a supposedly queer concept, and how that can get hijacked. That's why I really like to have this vagueness as i guess i find that more to the point of this concept.

“I feel neoliberalism is kind of dying, now. Sadly, it's being replaced by neo-fascism, which is very scary. Also, what I find interesting is that with regard to this cycle going so fast now”

BW: Some of the other areas that seem to be underpinning your work are cybernetics, yes?

SW: Yes, Cybernetics like Alan Turing, or something. It's like the Internet, where people can come together. Some people present these spaces as alien or dangerous. Yeah, they're actually not dangerous. For some other people, they're actually a life-saver. Also, I really think that whole question has collapsed in terms of these ideas of art, anyway. In Germany, it's still quite strict with that high and low culture. It's painting, or it's club music as entertainment. I mean, it's influenced most modern art.

BW: Your soundtracks are so heavily bled. You're almost smashing those roles directly together play both artist and actor.

SW: Exactly. I'm acting when I'm performing, but I'm also in myself, so it's a bit schizophrenic.

BW: Are you interested in Manuel Delanda’s Assemblage Theory?

SW: The assemblage theory, yeah. It's interesting and a bit more druggy, but at the same time, it's nice. It seems a bit more instinctual. That's something interesting with [Dan Graham] and stuff, this idea of the collective ritual. I'm also really fascinated with the idea of the outdoors, that going back to nature. It's of course a really urban concept. It's a fantasy. I remember I went to this car design school in Pasadena where they were designing electric cars. There was one person whose job was just interaction. I said, "Oh, so I guess you're into [Bruno Latour], eh?" "Yes." I got it. It was cool to watch it from that perspective. Then said, “let's design an electric car for the outdoors”. I thought this is just a BMW but for people who don't want to be baby boomers. I shut my mouth, but I was watching the whole thing.

BW: Could you talk about the Casio you use for a moment in the context of the mediums in which you work in?

SW: It was starting to build up nostalgia, and that wasn't really my interest so I stopped using it in performances. I'm against nostalgia. I'm interested in how an object triggers memory, but that's different. People were like, oh, it makes me feel so comfortable because it makes me think of my childhood. I am more interested in how psychoanalytic film can create this kind of environment and memory. I'm also interested in people like Edward Bernays and his work on propaganda. I'm very aware of how language is used to persuade people, and that scares me. I have to know about it in order to combat it, I guess.

BW: How you define what you do as an artist?

SW: I just say I do everything. If I have to write a bio, I'll be like artist, musician, and writer, in that order. I just say I do everything.

BW: Could you talk a little bit about ["Fear Indexing the X-Files?"] Did you go back and watch them all?

SW: Yeah, I watched them all. I guess I'm always interested in cataloging. I also like Henrik Olesen or Arnold Dreyblatt. All of their work deals with archiving, memory, and history. I was interested in how ideology inhabits a space. That's what happens in shopping, but it also happens in television. Also, the '90s were presented as this kind of [middle] space, but actually it was just the advent of neoliberalism and was between the Cold War and the War on Terror.

Aliens have a different semiotic. Before they were a metaphor for communism. Now they're just an alien. They've been shredded of political ideology. As I was watching as an adult, I was interested in looking back on how I would watch this differently. I had a huge appetite as a child. I was thinking, how much did this thing influence my upbringing? It's more about your growing up and how that absorbs into you.

It was made by Fox. As was pointed out in the book, there are some quite right-wing elements in there. With a fresh set of eyes and ears, you think oh, damn, but when you're a kid, you don't really think about it. Also, you're just too young. You don't get it.

It's this idea of a club space being dangerous because of AIDS. It's just this whole hysteria. Also, what's interesting is there's this huge distrust of the government and the idea of the conspiracy theory being sent from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream. That's come back. "The X-Files" coincided with the rise of the Internet and how people started to engage with the Internet and process that. That was the first TV show with an Internet-based fan base. They'd go to chat rooms. Chris Carter would linger, lurking in it to try to influence people. He was quite an evil genius, but quite cool.

Because of the collapse of this communist narrative and before the War on Terror, it was then, who's your enemy? Oh, it's your fellow citizen, or aliens. The phrase is "trust no one." The country's ideology is about the individual. It's always about how we keep this country going. Oh, we'll pit everyone against each other. It's not even capitalism; it's just the new ideology. It's the Panopticon.

I feel neoliberalism is kind of dying, now. Sadly, it's being replaced by neo-fascism, which is very scary. Also, what I find interesting is that with regard to this cycle going so fast now. Think about it: The acceleration up until 2012 was [very quaint]. Even something as scary as the American or British election results, or the referendum results – there's no plan. There's no ideology anymore. It's going to collapse.

It's kind of interesting in a really dark kind of way. There's some kind of hope. Capitalism is going to fall apart. I just hope everyone is still alive, because it's absolutely terrifying. I just feel the world is just speeding up so much now. I don't think sometimes that we're going to make it through this year. It gives me some hope, in that these people clearly have no clue. Theresa May does not have a mandate on anything anymore. Trump's poll rating is very low.

I'm interested in what happens next. I guess that's what keeps me hopeful about it. I see it in terms of the EU or something. It's a peace-time project. The idea of the second world war and that it could come back – well, actually it has come back. We have to deal with it. It's real. We have to be really real and pragmatic about this. We can't be scared. We can't fear. It's boring. We have to deal with it. I feel people are dealing with it. That's the more interesting part.

Steven Warwick is a British artist, musician and writer residing in Berlin. His practice includes durational performance installations, plays and films using the construction of situations and language. He also makes music as Heatsick and under his own name – the latest release, Nadir, appeared recently on PAN. Warwick has exhibited work at SMK Copenhagen, the Modern Institute Glasgow, ICA London, Balice Hertling NYC, Exile Galerie Berlin, Kinderhook & Caracas, Kurator CH, New Theater Berlin, Schinkel Pavillon and was artist in residence at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles 2015. His writing has appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, Urbanomic, Arte East and Electronic Beats.

Constant Dullaart is a conceptual artist using the platforms and tools of the Internet as a space of inquiry and critique about technology’s impact on the world. From distributing millions of purchased Instagram followers to famous art world Instagram accounts to creating an army of thousands of fake Facebook profiles, Dullaart’s work critically and witfully examines that networks and structures that inform and govern our lives and identities as we become represented in the digital era. We sat down for a conversation in his Brooklyn studio, where he is a current member of the ISCP residency program, courtesy of the Mondriaan Fund.

Brett Wallace: What was your origin in art?

Constant Dullaart: When I was 12, I became fascinated with video on TV. I had this vision of hearing a conversation inside the plane while you watched the plane take off from the outside. You would never hear that in a natural situation, but now you would be allowed to hear it. I realized you could add another conversation to it about something else. I was fascinated by how the contextual layering could create a new type of image or a new way to process reality.

BW: How would you describe your work?

CD: I’m working with cultural artifacts that I find or appropriate. I’m interested in the vernacular or the dialect that informs culture. And it’s interesting to me to change the medium or context of such vernacular because then you can reframe and shed a new light on things.

For example, right now you’re helping me sort SIM cards. I have 100,000 of them. These SIM cards are a part of a larger industry verifying fake accounts on social media. In the pile, we can see the SIM cards with numbers on them. Those ones have been used in arrays to verify thousands of identities.

It’s interesting how these cards are a physical artifact of an industry constructing artificial identities, which is a fake audience amplifying opinions of those that have enough money to make that process happen. In the natural flow of things these SIM cards would mostly go to the person who wanted to retrieve the slivers of gold in the SIM cards. People would try to mine that gold like scrap metal. And I think the interesting part is that I’m reframing the SIM card itself culturally.

BW: Who inspires you?

CD: Gregor Schneider is a very important artist to me. The KLF. Then, there are a lot of friends and peers. I’m interested in being surprised by so many different people in this dynamic field.

BW: What is the process and platforms you’re working with from neural nets to websites?

CD: For me, the process becomes part of the medium. If you were to analyze it like a painting it would be part of the paint. I think of the platforms I work with in the same way. I’m interested in how representation has influence on us. For example, when I found the first image that was ever Photoshopped, “Jennifer in Paradise”, I was interested in what informs the way that Photoshop is thought about.

Photoshop is used in a certain way to manipulate the documentation or the representation of reality. Photography itself manipulates things. The lens manipulates reality, the fact that you stop time by closing the shutter, the film, the type of camera, the height the camera, how it is held or mounted, all these things inform the picture. There is additional manipulation through the material that is added through Photoshop such as enhancing the lighting, adding filters etc. I was also interested in the people behind it that made the software, the first hand decisions of how it was presented. Then, this origin story that involved an actual picture being the first one. And, adding a romantic story to it. It was a beautiful notion that there was this person who was still alive sitting between sea and shore, between digital and analogue.

We could talk about other examples in how we deal with the representation of ourselves, specifically within this era, how it’s dynamic, how we don’t completely understand yet. We could think of the phone itself or where Instagram came from, the profile as a framework for representation etc. And, because everyone is representing themselves as a brand, I thought it would be interesting to do it as a company.

“I see much of what I do as a participatory cultural anthropologist”

I join in on the game and then I figure out the strange cultural artifacts I could find there. How could I transpose them into another medium so we can analyze them again and see them through a new lens? Maybe we have become accustomed to the fact that you can buy Instagram followers. But, if you translate it to other ways you can see what it takes physically to do that then that action gets a whole other meaning.

BW: Could you share your viewpoint the future of technology and the idea of reclaiming space in techno-capitalism?

CD: An example that sets the stage is Thurn und Taxis, the aristocratic family who started the postal system in Europe. They were so powerful that they manipulated and controlled the communication infrastructure. Thurn und Taxis ran the mail. The postal system was later nationalized, and even had their own military to protect the integrity of communication.

The fact is we can talk about democracy and election systems all we want, but if that fades away. If there are companies in place, that we only elected by way of market, only by way of adding functionality to our lives, but not actually by rechecking an ideology and getting politics and actual discourse into it, I think that’s where this stuff gets problematic.

“We’re from a generation that both saw in that generation the potential of technological Esperanto – this idea that people could program themselves, that technology could make things accessible and people could control it themselves.”

Constant Dullaart, image of a fake Hessian army the artist created to take on capitalism. Copyright: Constant Dullaart

We all saw that potential in technology and now we have seen it fading away because there’s too much money to be made. We all thought there would be a moment when borders would become totally ornamental. Borders in Europe opened up. There was the end of the Balkan wars. There was the potential that these new countries would join Europe and these borders would be open again. Now you see people protecting themselves again because they feel like they’re losing something. Some people might not be able to join and speak that technological Esparanto. There’s this wave of internationalization not everyone can join. Certain people can jump on their EasyJet flight, but other people have their regular jobs outside of the visa waiver borders, can’t join the easy market and are very frustrated. Not everyone can cross the borders, only those who have the right passports, the right access.

A Google account would still be international, without borders; you could be the same person to Google, maybe making less revenue because what you generate for advertisements is less, but in principle you get this idea that

“you’re part of something bigger, this connected global community, almost forming this global humanism, even leaking into transhumanism.”

But, there’s this strange discrepancy between the ideological threshold these companies have to be beneficial for many people versus the oppressive reality that people can’t vote or have any control of what these companies do. What if American citizens voted about a rule that affected everyone in the world because it affected a certain US based company. Or a company might apply certain cultural restrictions on images or self-representation that are completely ridiculous in another country, like current sexual or moral implications. The company is forcing its global culture onto you. I think that’s where its problematic where people are reacting with this nationalization. A lot of people are in disbelief and sad that this technological Esparanto may not happen. A lot of people I know are on Reddit and no one shares their profile name because they want to have their posts disconnected from their identity. It’s valued. This is something we’ll have to fight to keep and uphold. I took the long way to answer this because the short way says, in more of a technological context less of an artistic context, we’re fucked.

“The roads that are built have ethical implications we might only find out about years later.”

It’s about check and balances – we have complicated organization structures and we have societal agreements, but then what does that mean if we talk about billion dollar companies. Do we get to vote on any kind of cultural policy that’s implicated or does there have to be a moral uproar before someone says you should close the channels used by the alt-right? Or, should you say that also have a right to free speech. Where are you going to have that discourse, who’s going to talk about this, it is just going to be political or is it going to be community management and is it only going to be taken seriously if you’re going to lose customers through it.

Let’s imagine there’s another flood somewhere in the US. Uber suddenly surges enormously because everyone wants to get out of there, what happens after a while? Everyone says #DeleteUber once again to say we’re not going to support this company anymore. Is that the only power that we have as citizens in making decisions? Or could there be a law that supports surging to a certain percentage?

Premiered at Rotterdam Film Festival in 2013, Crystal Pillars features a video diary filmed in the five years prior to the 2012 New Museum performance, which documents the artist's real life social encounters during his time on Facebook. Dullaart reflects on abandoning this online identity through a voiceover comprised of his own thoughts, the words of Mark Zuckerberg, Lil B, Christopher Poole, Henna Hyvärinen and Facebook's 2012 public prospectus. Image and description courtesy of Carroll Fletcher gallery.

BW: I think you’re raising an interesting question about how participatory can we be and how reactive or proactive a corporation can be when it comes to social justice. I’m reminded of the 2013 Rana Plaza factories that collapsed in Bangladesh and the backlash against factory conditions that created, only after the fact. Just this week we saw CEOs resign from the President’s manufacturing council after he protected racist protestors. It was good to see that and I hope we can see more proactive corporate activism.

CD: Exactly. I think there’s a corporate culture within a lot of these companies that wants to be disruptive and destabilize structures in society to break through to create a new revolutionary way of doing something. That could be very beneficial to society and be great. And, if you have enough money and you’re international, yes Uber is great because you can find the same quality of service wherever you land. But, from a negative side, in that sense, fascism is also great because everything is just the same. If you want to have control over one of these companies, politically, it’s really difficult because they always to stay a step ahead where there is no legislation yet. This is kind of gaming the political system to catch up.

BW: We’re talking in front of 100,000 SIM cards and sorting them. What is this project?

CD: A lot of these cards have been used in the process of mass verification for constructed identities. Let’s say you need 25,000 Facebook followers to like your brand. You could find and target followers that behave similarly and then start to befriend these people in order to create dominant opinions. As we know from psychological research, people tend to copy the dominant opinion of people around them. If you do it right, people won’t see the difference if the opinion is fake or real. That’s why you would need thousands of social media accounts. These social media accounts get verified through SIM cards. I’m now designing a monument of all the deleted soldiers of these propaganda wars.

Constant Dullaart (NL, 1979), former resident of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, lives and works in Berlin. Like the work of his digital native peers, Dullaart’s often conceptual work manifests itself both online and offline. Within his practice, he reflects on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies while critically engaging the power structures of mega corporations that dramatically influence our worldview through the internet. He examines the boundaries of manipulating Google, Facebook and Instagram and recently started his own tech company Dulltech™ with Kickstarter.

Dullaart has curated several exhibitions and lectured at universities and academies throughout Europe, most recently at Werkplaats Typografie, a post-graduate programme at ArtEZ, Arnhem. In 2015, he was awarded the Prix Net-Art, the international prize for internet art.

ROSA MENKMAN is an artist and theorist who focuses on visual noise artifacts, resulting from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch, encoding and feedback artifacts). Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Menkman emphasizes their positive consequences: these artifacts facilitate an important insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardization, which takes place through resolutions: the creation of solutions or protocols, and their black-boxed, unseen, forgotten or obfuscated compromises and alternative possibilities.

Rosa Menkman: Interestingly enough, people ask me this question regularly. To be honest, I can’t think of one specific moment and say: this is when I became an artist. I am used to thinking of myself as a theorist. I have always had some kind of practice, but my affiliation to theory and writing feels like a priority. Accepting or allowing myself to be called an artist happened only recently; at a certain point I felt like I had to re-evaluate.

A lot of my work is inspired by practice based research; research done by others and research I conduct myself. When I started writing about the art collective Jodi for instance, they grew into a huge inspiration. They made me see that media are more than just these simple, fun tools. I started to take things apart in a jodi-esque way and while doing so, changed and grew my own practice. I learned that new media are actually vastly complex mechanisms with inherent economics and politics. When you just theorize media, you'll miss part of the actual depth of the matter. So seeing Jodi’s work was not the starting point of my art career but it was definitely an important turning point.

It can be a powerful experience when art shatters your expectations and preconceptions. When it happens, it feels like some kind of filter is peeled away. What is left can be a new take on life, art, language, love or how the body works. It is a rare happening, but I believe it is very real.

At the same time, to me, working as an artist is also a double edged sword. I feel incredibly lucky to be doing as well as I am, but I don’t really know where the art ends and my life starts, or where my theory and practice separate. Right now it seems like they are completely inhabiting the same space, which is not always easy or even ‘allowed’, and can be kind of exhausting: to constantly represent Rosa the artist, the theorist, the human being.

BW: How did you first encounter Jodi.org’s work?

RM: Jodi started making work for the web since the early 90s, but the first time I really took notice was in 2005, when Montevideo, a since dissolved media art institution in Amsterdam, hosted their solo show "World Wide Wrong". I think this show was so impressive to me because of the texts that accompanied it (by Annet Dekker and Josephine Bosma). They really opened my eyes.

Embedded video from Jodi.org, World Wide Wrong, 2005.

BW: The video with all the folders makes me think of the storage of pedagogy.

RM: Haha, or maybe more like a storage anti-pedagogy...

BW: What first attracted you to the idea of net art or glitch art?

RM: After seeing the show, I wrote my 2006 thesis about the collective. At this time it was rather hard to find theory on net.art and Jodi. I scraped all of del.icio.us’ bookmarks for “netart”, “net.art” and “jodi.org”, etc, but not a lot (if any) of the texts described Jodi’s work as glitch art. In my master thesis I actually ended up using the term glitch two times. In the early 2000s, only a handful of artists referred to their practice as Glitch Art; it really was the work of trailblazers. Beflix started a blog dedicated to glitch in 2001 and Per Platou organised a festival/symposium called Glitch in Norway in 2002. The Glitch Art Flickr pools’ first posts date back to 2004. Of course there was already theory on the use of glitch in music, for instance in Cascone’s paper “The Aesthetics of Failure (2000)”, but it seems like these conversations really stayed under a fold or inside their specific (sonic) discourse. The genre that is now widely known as Glitch Art established itself gradually and later.

To come back to your question about what triggered me to work with glitch after finishing my thesis: I think generally, when it comes to glitch, it is not (just) the aesthetic that gets people involved. What is really interesting about the glitch is its moment/um.

“that moment that makes you pivot and reflect. It grabs you; but you don't know what is going on or what way to go. It is a powerful confusion that inspires you to read and pushes you to try and make sense.”

It's when an object slides from a normal operation into something that is different, maybe more than just ‘normal’. It recontextualizes the tool, and uncovers a new layer of operation. Suddenly there is more to the tool, but I don’t fully understand it yet. It's that change, that powerful moment that makes me reevaluate my understanding of media, its materials and practices (conventions and expectations fed by habits) that got me first excited about glitch art. I still relay to these principles a lot in what I now call “Resolution Studies”.

Of course today, the Glitch Art genre has grown a static, standardized side as well, often referred to as ‘glitch aesthetics’. Personally, this side of Glitch Art does not always interest me as much. But the moment/um in glitch still exists; this power is inherent to the nature of glitch. Glitch is not just an output. It is procedural; the way something breaks from a flow and the way someone perceives this break. Then again, the momentous power of change is not something new. I don't think that the Glitch Art genre is the only genre that is connected to the slippage of media, or this power of reframing.

BW: I was thinking of artists like Nam June Paik and how they’ve influenced the medium.

RM: This already happened earlier, during the turn of the last century, with the Dadaists. Although it is important to realize they were fighting in a completely different political context and their work is often wrongfully co-opted as a figure of speech: I cringe when I read descriptions like ‘Dadaist Glitch’. But the momentous power that was inherent in Dadaist art may be similar.

BW: Yeah. The power of dismantling and deconstructing is a thread throughout art history. The political context was vastly different as you said. Dada developed out of WWI and the rejection of logic and reason of modern capitalism. You mentioned Resolution Studies. Could you elaborate on that more?

RM: Some digital artists jump from one project to the next. I often miss an insight into what drives these artists; or a red thread that runs through their practice. Works like these are often kind of trickster or ‘fun’. Look, this software can do this! Ha, wow, LOL! But I wonder if these simple technological gestures are enough to leverage the powers that our technologies have and the violence they do to our daily lives - which is something I am interested in. I do not necessarily need (funny) alternatives or interventions, but would much rather have the knowledge to empower myself, to discover or even create my own problems and solutions.

This is why the core of my practice is Resolution Studies, a theory through which I try to uncover not just the affordances of our media, but also their compromises and hidden potentialities. I am not a technological savant by any means, but I do try to have a reasonable amount of knowledge of the technologies I use and believe it is important to share this.

On the other hand, I have experienced that creating a practice around technology is awkward. Not a lot of people care about the politics of algorithms. If I for instance explain how Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) differs from analog video (PAL), it could easily become a very technical story, which would not be very captivating to a larger audience. But I think it is important to share this technological knowledge with a wide range of people, which is why I started using a tactic of anthropomorphizing. One of the earliest works in which I employed this is in “The Collapse of PAL” (2010). In TCoP, the Angel of History (a reference to Walter Benjamin) talks to PAL (Phase Alternate Line Signal), as if it was a friend, maybe a lover even.

Notes about the work from the artist - “As performed at TV-TV on the 25th of May 2010, Copenhagen, DK. The video work is based on analogue signal, compressions, glitches and feedback artifacts in sound and video. In "The Collapse of PAL" (Eulogy, Obsequies and Requiem for the planes of blue phosphor), the Angel of History (as described by Walter Benjamin) reflects on the signal PAL and its termination.”

BW: I was watching "HyperNormalisation" by Adam Curtis. I don't know if you've seen that film.

RM: Yeah. I watched it on two screens; one for the movie and one for my Wikipedia searches; I actually had to watch it two times because I kept losing the thread - that movie was dense.

BW: I think to me, some of your work definitely brings that film to mind. In your work you’re opening up the kimono to expose the technology and show how they are actually built.

RM: Did you say kimono?

BW: Kimono.

RM: Like the Japanese garment - Is that a saying?

BW: “Opening the kimono” is a saying. It's actually used in Silicon Valley to talk about the idea of openly sharing information. Frances Stark and David Kravitz titled a show after it in 2014 at the New Museum, but their use of the term was more direct, as they conducted a sexting performance via iMessage.

RM: I had no idea.

BW: What's interesting is that you're opening up things inside technology that people normally don't or can't see. Is there a current set of tools that you're really into right now?

RM: Right now I'm building in Unity. Unity is a 3D engine that is used for many things, but first and foremost for videogame development and VR. As for what I am into - this obviously changes all the time, but at this time I am still drawn to think and rethink Syphon, a software plugin developed by Anton Marini and Tom Butterworth, which allows the user to ‘syphon’ - to share in and output - from one software to the next. So imagine for instance sending your videogame output into a live VJ software: now you can overlay it with other media, or perform a ‘powerpoint’ with it. I am also interested in DCT compression (Discrete Cosine Transform, the basis of for instance JPEG). I actually just released a work dedicated to two of these pieces of technology, called DCT:SYPHONING.

RM: DCT:SYPHONING, The 1000000th interval (or in decimal: The 64th interval) is a modern translation of the 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott roman "Flatland". But instead of describing a two-dimensional world, occupied by geometric figures that narrate the implications of life in two dimensions, in DCT:SYPHONING an anthropomorphised DCT (Senior) tells the processes of the compression algorithm. Specifically, the work describes DCT Juniors’ first syphon; the translation of data from one image compression realm to the next; or one realm of complexity to a next. DCT:SYPHONING is part of my ‘Ecology of Compression Complexities’, a world in which different signals connect to each other. It also functions in connection to my earlier work, via small references.

I was inspired to create this Ecology of Compression Complexities after I saw the work of Charles Avery at Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, in 2015. While Avery works with more classic materials, such as painting and drawing, it resonated with me and made me rethink my own practice.

The gallery described the exhibit like this:

“In 2004 Charles Avery embarked on a project called The Islanders, which was conceived as a way to explore, consolidate and give direction to his art and ideas. The Islanders is a painstakingly detailed and diverse description of a fictional island in drawing and painting, sculpture and texts.”

Every drawing and every installation that Avery puts on show, unveils a little part of The Island. I find that inspiring; I prefer projects that do not exist in a vacuum, that do not just simply begin and end. I like it when a practice keeps building, when it is part of a larger puzzle. But the only way I can imagine that my practice can exist in the form of such a ‘world-like’ framework, is by anthropomorphizing the algorithms I am working with. This is why I am making all these creatures meet in some kind of absurd transmission ecology. I see DCT:SYPHONING as just a first step; it is an illustration of an environment in which the DCT compression algorithms are the protagonists: these little creatures encode and encapsulate data and carry it from one material environment to the next. I like to imagine this algorithm talking to that algorithm, even though in reality, these technologies are not compatible and would never ‘communicate’.

In my world, they can all visit and have an exchange with each other! And while I have considered that the joining of these four words ‘Ecology of Compression Complexities’ sounds dense and complicated, I believe they are the best ones to sum up my practice. Which is why, for now at least, I am sticking with them.

BW: I saw your DCT:SYPHONING presentation and performance at Transmediale after the #Additivism Cookbook release. Could you explain a bit more about that?

RM: In tandem with the release and performance of DCT:SYPHONING at Transmediale, which you are refering too, I released three papers. The first paper was part of the #Additivism cookbook. Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke started #Additivism in 2015, as a manifesto on speculative materialism, 3D and plastics. During this years Transmediale festival, they released the #Additivism cookbook, a compendium of 100 recipes, written by artists within the speculative framework of #Additivism, rethinking and unthinking digital material methodologies. In the cookbook I released the recipe “How not to be read”.

Rosa Menkman, “How Not to be Read (A recipe using DCT)”, 2016. P. 238 of the 3D Additivist Cookbook.

“DCT appropriates the aesthetics of JPEG macroblocks to mask secret messages as error. Because the legibility of an encrypted message does not just depend on the complexity of the encryption algorithm, but also on the placement of the data of the message. The encrypted message, hidden on the surface of the image is only legible by the ones in the know; anyone else will ignore it like dust on celluloid.”

In this recipe I describe how DCT, a cryptographic language technology that I build in 2015, can be used to write secret messages on digital images, steganographically masked as JPEG artifacts. I created DCT in 2015, for my first solo show at Transfer Gallery: the iRD (the institutions for Resolution Disputes). In this exhibition, DCT formed the basis for 5 institutions (5 statements against the politics of modern institutions, written in a manifesto style). During the Transmediale I finally released the DCT font and published its basic principles as a recipe in the #Additivism Cookbook.

The second paper I released during Transmediale was named “Untie:Solve:Dissolve Resolutions”. It was published as part of the Machine Research peer reviewed newspaper, printed in DCT and in human readable code. In this short text, I outline some basic statements on Resolution Studies:

Translation of text enclosed above in red:

“Resolution studies is a theory of literacy: literacy of the machines, the people, the people creating the machines, and the people being created by the machines. But resolution studies is not only about the effects of technological progress or the aesthetization of the scales of resolution; which has already been done under headers such as Interface Effect or Protocol. Resolution studies is research about the standards that could have been in place, but are not - and which as a result are now left outside of the discourse.”

With resolution studies I am taking a step away from my old research on glitch, in the hope to open up a broader set of conversations between the discourses such as medicine, architecture and law.

Finally, I released a work in the Transmediale Reader across & beyond, which is an honor to be part of. When Kristoffer Gansing first invited me to reflect on The Collapse of PAL, I had some doubts to enter that subject again; it seemed a bit too old (the last time I performed TCoP was 5 years ago). By the end of 2014-15 any kind of compatibility with an analogue video signal was completely erased, and today it seems kind of nostalgic and irrelevant to revisit the material of PAL.

What finally pushed me in favor of writing something new on TCoP was actually Syphon as well. With Syphon, analog and digital signals can again co-exist during a performance. So in the Transmediale reader, PAL finally wrote back to the Angel, via Syphon. Imagine, here we have PAL, a zombie medium that can suddenly communicates and functions besides other media, due to the implementation of a new protocol.

BW: Does data live forever?

RM: Not forever - Although digital media are often believed to answer to the myths of lossless transmission and migration, in fact, degradation and data loss are a not to be ignored part of the digital material. Undead data and dead data are as much part of our digital realities.

BW: Your way of working speaks to a post studio way of working: there is no beginning or end in the work. It's sort of in a constant state of flux, which also mirrors the state of algorithms and tech in general. What does your studio look like, what is your set-up like?

RM: I am at the final leg of a 5 month residency at Schloss Solitude (in Stuttgart). Which means that right now, I am living in a castle. But I actually gave up rent quite some time ago and have since been travelling with a little suitcase and a computer. Recently I bought a desktop computer. How crazy is that? This is a real computer that is heavier than a laptop and that has the dimensions of a piece of carry-on luggage; it is actually too heavy to carry with just one arm. I am not sure but I think this might be the start of something new.

BW: I love the way you describe that too because it sounds like pretty much up to this point you've been working on laptops. Are you using iOS or Windows?

RM: Yeah, for now I am. But I am also noticing a massive migration: a lot of my friends are changing to Windows, as will I, when I finally install the tower in the castle.

BW: Actually the company where I work, LinkedIn, was acquired by Microsoft recently. Why do you think this shift is happening so rapidly?

RM: Of course one reason is that iOS systems are closed, not just in terms of software but maybe more importantly - when it comes to people migrating - in terms of their hardware. Some weeks ago, I had such a bad accident. I fell all the way down a staircase... and while I was falling all these meters down, the only thing I could think about was this laptop in my arms. I was trying to save it. Unfortunately both the laptop and I got hurt: a broken screen. And you know how much this accident costed? 500 Euros. I have no words... just: Evil Media.

Right then and there, underneath the staircase I had enough and found the a reason to switch. But this kind of accidental damage is of course besides point, this is not why this massive migration is taking place. Two simple reasons I personally see for the shift are that computers need a lot of power to render movies shot in 3D or run VR, and Apple just simply does not let the user upgrade to this kind of power. Besides that, iOS is just not compatible with some of the basic VR peripherals such as the Oculus headset.

BW: It's interesting to think about how tech titans will operate in the future when it comes to openness as a strategy vs. the walled garden.

In the book, Chun writes: “New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same.”

We're at a stage that the speed of the upgrade is incommensurable… new upgrades are ready too fast. And because of this speed, remaining the same, or using technology in a continuous manner, has become next to impossible. I think these titans consciously impose this tactic: to exploit the speed of the upgrade as a way to to obscure the new options, interfaces and (im)possibilities of the ever rigid walls of our techno-gardens.

BW: What is your perspective on reclamation of space within technology? I'm thinking of how Constant Dullaart uses that word, reclaim. Is reclamation something that you're interested in?

RM: I am not sure how Constant uses the word, but I think critical and tactical actions that result in reclamation will always remain important. On the other hand, I wonder if today reclamation is the right word, or if it should be a main focus: can reclamation still be an end goal?

One of the main problems I see is the incremental declination of the value of knowledge. Actions are no longer backed up by facts; the wish comes first, and then the necessary data to justify an act is simply created by shifting around scales and contexts. In the wrong context, every fact can be waved away as ‘fake’. And what starts as a factoid becomes a fact by putting it in the ‘right’ context.. Scaling and contextualization have become two of the most violent, yet often overlooked actions when it comes to the handling of a dataset. I think this is partially the reason why we got stuck with constructs such as fake news and alternative facts and it is also why I think that reclaiming, the process of claiming something back, or of reasserting a right, is hard as an end goal.

But understanding that we live in a time in which knowledge is fluid; where everything we proof is dependent on the scales we chose and measure by and the context in which we perceive, is maybe also one of the most empowering pieces of knowledge. So yes, we can and should still think tactically. But we have to rethink our former tactics; where are tactical reclamations still useful, against whom or from what? The time of turf wars has ended - carving out space, by smart usage of scale and context is the future.

Jessica Lynne is a Brooklyn-based writer and arts administrator. She is also co-editor of ARTS.BLACK, a platform for art criticism from black perspectives. Jessica contributes to publications such as Art in America, The Art Newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Pelican Bomb. She was founding editor of the now defunct Zora Magazine. Currently, Jessica serves as the Manager of Development and Communication at Recess. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @lynne_bias.

We sat down over coffee in midtown to discuss a wide range of topics from Jessica’s first jobs in the art world to how she defines innovation through launching the ARTS.BLACK platform and the Black Art Incubator at Recess.

Brett Wallace: What was your origin in art?

Jessica Lynne: That’s a great question. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my dad taking me and my brother to a local children’s museum where they had a few Norman Rockwell paintings on view. And, as an adult it doesn’t strike me as odd, but as a child, I actually had no context for really understanding who Rockwell was or why my father was particularly inclined to enjoy his work. Now, I get it. Rockwell has a particularly uncanny way about of visualizing Americana that remains important.

In high school, I was an athlete, though I think I was always cognizant of culture and theater and dance, just not actively plugged in. It wasn’t until I came to New York for school that I started to think critically about cultural production. I went to NYU, stopped playing sports, and found myself kind of in this new generation of burgeoning hip-hop writers. That forced me to think differently about what was happening in music, especially in New York City.

BW: Were there a few people that were meaningful to you back then in terms of influences?

JL: I found great influences in people like Marcella Runell Hall, now at Mount Holyoke, who was working at the Center for Multi-Education and Programs at NYU at the time. Marcella is a hip-hop pedagogy scholar. There was also a professor, Daniel Banks, who was doing some cool work around hip-hop and theater. I got deep into that before swinging over, finally, to fine art and visual culture. In 2010 that I started writing for Zora Magazine. Eventually, I was brought on to the editorial team by my good friend Ope, and I sort of led the culture vertical.

While there, I was commissioning a lot of interviews, doing a lot of reviews on, still at the time, hip-hop related things, but slowly merging over into other disciplines and forms. I got to a point where I realized that there were smarter people writing about hip-hop; it’s a beautiful genre of journalism and cultural criticism, but it was okay if I wasn’t doing it. It was also in school that I was first introduced to bell hooks and her book Art on my Mind and in that book she’s writing about a particular type of art criticism that I actually didn’t see in the field. I was like, oh I can do that.

In 2010 digital publications were starting to blossom and a lot of traditional art magazines were also migrating to digital. This was the landscape as I started to write more publicly. Also, after school, I took a job at this important organization, 651 ARTS, a performing arts organization in Brooklyn dedicated to performing arts of the African Diaspora.

There I was — trying my hand at art criticism, learning the beautiful history of this organization, and encountering a new host of artists and the dots started to connect for me. I think I told you in our earlier conversation, I was also working part-time at Bonhams.

BW: Yes, Bonhams, the auction house. That was your first professional art gig, right?

JL: I started at Bonhams first and then moved over to 651.

BW: They are very different in scope. Nonprofit versus for profit. A utility versus an ideology.

JL: I really like that language, utility versus ideology, actually. I was caught in that. The position at Bonhams was important to me because I am not someone who studied art history. I was able to acquire the knowledge that I should have arguably had as someone who wanted to write about art. At 651, I spent time thinking about how these two very different canons either were or were not as robust as they should’ve been. I was doing a lot, probably more than I should have been doing at 22.

BW: It sounds like you were learning about what you ultimately wanted to do by testing new ventures.

JL: Yes. We were on the other side of the recession, and I think a lot of people my age were trying to figure out how to make their way in the world. I told myself, “okay I'm going to try nonprofit work, I'm going to try my hand at writing, and then I'm also going to be in the auction house orbit for a bit and see what sticks.” It just so happened that something stuck.

BW: That sums up work life today; test a lot of things, find what you love to do, and can be great at and go for it. It takes some dead ends to find. I always loved what Steve Jobs said about work, “If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.” How do you describe the multiple roles you live in today?

JL: Most often I usually just say I'm a writer and an art administrator, which is rather boring. But I do feel like fundamentally as we have come to understand those terms, they fit well for me. You know like some people have thought of ARTS.BLACK as a type of innovation effort and so, by extension, people refer to me and Taylor, my co-editor, as innovators. Admittedly, I don't always see myself that way but those are my own hang ups.

BW: Innovation has a long steep history of what product life cycles and disruption and it comes from a corporate lens.

JL: And maybe that’s it, maybe that’s the subtext. How do I acknowledge that I’m offering something new to the world without feeling like I'm kind of using language from a world that doesn’t exactly match my own, as a nonprofit worker, as a critic? Those are my own hang-ups. But I do like using the term “art administrator” understanding that language as someone who helps to place frames around work that’s already being done by artists, helping to think critically about how to make those processes as efficient as possible, as rigorous as possible. I don’t know what the other terminology I would use at the moment.

BW: Yeah, you’re comfortable with it .

JL: Super comfortable, but I’m aware that language often fails us.

ARTS.BLACK is a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives predicated on the belief that art criticism should be an accessible dialogue - a tool through which we question, celebrate, and talk back to the global world of contemporary art. The journal is edited by Taylor Renee Aldridge and Jessica Lynne.

BW: I suppose this is a two-part question. How did you get started with ARTS.BLACK, as an online journal? I think you frame it as a journal. And what is the vision that you have, at least now being a couple years into it?

JL: I love telling this story. Taylor and I had a host of mutual friends, who had been saying for years, that we needed to meet. When we finally met, I knew that something good would come from the friendship. We kept in touch and a few months later, Taylor posts a Facebook status asking people to identify young, black, art critics are. It becomes this thread of hundreds of comments and while that’s happening, me and her are also texting. She sends me a message saying that she’s purchased this URL, arts.black. She’s like “I have this idea, I know you’re a writer, I'm interested in cultural production, I'm a writer, let’s do this thing.” It’s almost hard to say no to that. Taylor’s energy is very laser focused.

We started off on Tumblr which was great in the beginning because we needed a platform that would allow us to disseminate the idea very quickly. A lot of the other young, black, art critics that we were reading were also publishing work on Tumblr. The decision to start on that platform served a dual purpose, and the mission was quite simple: to find young, black, art critics, people who weren’t necessarily being published in the mainstream journals, and to publish them in ours. Early on, we realized that we wanted ARTS.BLACK to be both a site for new writing and also a feeder, providing writers opportunities with other publications. That was and is really important. As an editor, I recognize that there are places who should absolutely pay attention to the writers I publish.

BW: Oh, that’s a super interesting way to think about a business model.

JL: We’ve had some great people write for us who are also writing for other publications. I don’t ever want ARTS.BLACK to be the only place where you can find black critics. But, if you do need a starting point, you can come to us.

BW: I like how you’re trying to use it as a platform that not only publishes, but closes the gap to publishing. How does the model work? What have you most learned about the model that stuck with you?

JL: I have to be so honest, as someone who also works in the nonprofit world, I was very adamant about not becoming a 501(c)(3). Taylor and I had many conversations about the pros and cons, and I was adamant about not moving in that direction. I didn’t want to fight for grants. I didn’t want to labor over proposals. It’s exhausting. We decided to become an LLC. However, most funding opportunities are still relegated to formal philanthropy so we also have a fiscal sponsor.

But, I still think that the LLC is an important statement to make, in that, we are beholden to only ourselves. A fiscal sponsor offers flexibility, and it allows us to acquire funds through grants should we decide to apply every now and again, but I didn’t want that to represent the entirety of the fiscal model. We don’t quite yet have a subscription model in place, so that’s one of the reasons that we took the break, to really look at a business structure. And, as many entrepreneurs have to do, sometimes you just figure it out as you’re in it. I'm really excited for 2017, because I think this is the year where we’ll learn what exactly it means to run, not just a journal, but a business. How do we ensure that subscribers feel compelled to give over five dollars a month to enjoy these essays that we’re publishing? What is our responsibility to them, then once they give?

BW: Yes, in terms of distribution of content, breathe of content etc.

JL: Exactly. ARTS.BLACK is not unlike any other publication. It requires us to ask tough questions and to dig our heels in and learn some things that we probably would not have imagined and considered.

BW: I imagine whether or not to take on advertising is a big decision.

JL: It’s a huge question that isn’t going away. We’re definitely trying to figure out the best model. Do we go advertising with a mix of a subscription? Do we do no advertising and go maybe the route of the Big Round Table or Mother Jones?We’re definitely learning a lot and I think that at two years in, this is part of the maturation process.

BW: How is thinking about the product and pool of writers you’re working with?

JL: I definitely want to grow the source, grow the pool.

BW: So you’re open to emerging writers or critics reaching out to you?

JL: Absolutely, but we’re also going to scale down. On the other side of our break, we’re coming back with a monthly issue form, publishing two pieces a month. While this means we can only publish two writers a month, I think it will force us to be as thoughtful as possible as editors. We’ve also divided up the labor in new ways. Taylor will solely work on the publishing side of things and head the business efforts, and I will lead the editorial efforts.

BW: As you said, less is more. If you limit it or create self imposed rules, it could allow you to focus and be experimental. What does it mean for you to be a critic in the art world today given the state of the state?

JL: I am someone who’s always understood and believed that writing is a political gesture. And, I also acknowledge the ways that artists and other cultural producers really use their work to respond to a moment. I think that’s my responsibility as a critic — to document and preserve what’s happening in real time so that there’s an archive that is created. It becomes a tool from which people in the future can learn, but also a way of acknowledging that artists are problem solvers. Artists ask questions of the world, and those questions and inquiries and investigations deserve to be taken seriously. They also deserve to be acknowledged in a public manner that invites other folks to respond to them.

I think critics are able to do that and the best critics want that to happen, so that’s what I'm really trying to do. Who aren’t we hearing? Like you said, what voices don’t make it to the center when we’re in these moments of political upheaval?

BW: I like the idea of what you’re saying, shining a light on these parts of the world that are so critical or unseen right now.

JL: As an administrator and a critic, I'm going to wear both hats now, I think that there are multiple centers. There are multiple places where fantastic work is being created and fantastic deep high level conversations are happening. It’s my responsibility to see it and to always acknowledge it and celebrate it when I can. I live in New York, so that means that I can’t be in Kansas City all the time, but if I know something’s happening, and if I know people are doing great work there, I want to be able to proclaim it, and I want to be able to ask questions of it, and create space for it.

BW: Who or what inspires you?

JL: I have been spending a lot of time re-reading two critics, Barbara Smith and Lucy Lippard. Barbara Smith identifies as a black feminist critic, and was part of a group of women who founded the Combahee River Collective. They put forth a few texts, the most seminal being This Bridge Called My Back. Smith wrote this pretty brilliant essay “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” and in this essay, she identifies what her responsibility is to other black women artists as someone who identifies as a critic. She wrote this in the ‘70’s, and I think I maybe read it once in college, but it’s very different now reading it given the new political reality.

I’ve been returning to her essay because I'm also trying to negotiate my responsibility, as we’ve been talking about, as a critic, but also as someone who identifies as a black feminist. On the other side of that, Lucy Lippard is someone who made it a point to think about multiple centers. Both women were around the same time, at the height of the feminist revolution, the height of the black power movement, the black arts movement. I think they present to me some really important lenses through which I may examine what’s happening now.

I’ve been inspired by them recently, and I'm trying not to end up in a rabbit hole of reading everything by them. Then, more broadly speaking, I’ve been really inspired by the collective energy of so many people in the country right now. It’s hard not to think about what’s happening under this current administration. But folks are coming out and showing up in big ways, and it’s hard to ignore them; that feels so potent right now, the urgency in that. I think people are realizing how high the stakes are. I’ve been galvanized by watching so many of my peers and friends and colleagues join the ranks and commit to, not just a one-time movement but a mobilization effort.

BW: Yeah, it’s inspiring. As they say, planes take off against the wind. Do you have an unrealized project?

JL: Oh, man. This is a great one because this is going to hold me accountable. So I’ve come back to essay writing that’s not related to art or visual culture. We’ll see how successful I am in that, because maybe at this point everything for me is rotating around visual and performance culture. But I really want to write a series of essays about my father and his biological father. The thesis of the project is in my connection to them and the invisible things that you inherit from people. At the same time, I really would like to use this project to think about the landscape of black Americana from about 1968 into the present moment. I believe in that project, intellectually so, but it’s increasingly becoming harder to find the time to get it off the ground. I had a really fantastic residency last summer in Maine, where I did the early outlining and drafting of a couple essays.

It was in the Space Gallery in Portland, Maine. They were piloting a program that brought artists of many disciplines to the space, to just work. There are no excuses. I don’t want to make excuses for myself. That project is what I need to be focusing right now.

JL: This is my way of reaffirming, I'm going to finish the essay collection.

BW: Could we talk about Recess and the Black Art incubator you launched?

JL: Absolutely. I currently am the manager of development and communications at Recess. I think Recess is probably one of the most dynamic art institutions in the city. It's a place that believes in artists and believes in artists as high level thinkers with a specific focus on process. We emphasize the relationships that artists form with publics and the rendering visible the artist’s labor. We don’t often have the chance to sit with an artist as they’re also sitting with a project so Recess is unique in that way.

I came on-board after co-organizing the Session project, Black Art Incubator, alongside Taylor, Kimberly Drew, and Jessica Bell Brown. We hosted 30 workshops in 35 days, which now seems like a phenomenal feat and essentially we were honing in on a few central points. What does it mean to bring together the seemingly disparate connections in the art world? How do we provide support to artists and those who may not necessarily identify as artists in ways that look different from other more conventional structures, like an MFA program, for example? And, then also, how do we have the tough questions about race, gender and class that permeate a lot of what we do in the arts, but are rarely addressed? Recess became a work space with plants, a computer station where folks would come in and kind of like send emails, get things done, and a reading area. The project had four pillars: office hours, open crits, archival practice, and art + money talks.

Our art +money talks were focused on everything from how to successfully write a grant, to how to market yourself as an artist without gallery representation. Our office hours invited professionals in the field to meet with other folks in the field who had questions about career paths, career transitions, or just wanted to talk to somebody who was working as a curator at a major New York City museum. Our open crits brought artists in conversation with curators and fellow writers. Whereas our office hours were more intimate encounters, the open crits usually involved two to three artists at a time. If someone from the public came in off the street, they could choose to sit and join in on that conversation. It was, in some ways, an exercise of trust and care because critiques, as you know, can be so loaded and so anxiety ridden.

BW: Yes and so inaccessible for so many people. They take place in demarcated spaces within institutions far too often. I love what you’re doing to create pathways and make things accessible. New York City is hard to get a foothold period and I see your work creating these pathways and platforms for others...almost like springboards. And, not just in NY, but in other centers.

JL: And that was important for us. We often referred to BAI as a living Google document which means the process of revision, editing, and then rebuilding has to always be taken into consideration. The local context was certainly important to the project. At the same time, we had so many conversations during that project with visitors who were just in town for the weekend and in that way those conversations were equally as generative because every single person who came through the doors made an imprint that accumulated over time. It was a profound thing to witness.

We also held a meditation yoga session. We were very particular in thinking about processes of care for one another and for ourselves. How do you slow down without losing the rigor of the work?

Our last official public event was a potluck where we just invited everyone to reflect with us. What does it mean to incubate? How should we be thinking about work in this time period? What didn’t you see that you wanted to see in the incubator. What would it mean to mount the project again?

And so, as I mentioned, afterwards I was brought on full-time, and I’m excited about watching other projects, though very different in structure, commit to the exposition of process. That’s what we were doing with BAI. Gallerists make decisions. Grant makers make decisions. Critics make decisions. Artists make decisions; we wanted to be transparent about those processes and invite visitors to agree, disagree, build, construct, tear-down, together in a safe environment.

Black Art Incubator at Recess. Photo courtesy of Recess.

BW: Provide a safe place to take intelligent risks or any risks.

JL: Exactly. Or, remove that veil.

BW: What’s next for you in 2017?

JL: I don’t think I’ve said this on the record yet, but I have a very, very targeted goal at the end of 2017 to write two pieces, whether they be like short reviews or short interviews, in another language. I speak Spanish, and I recently started studying German, again. I want to start writing in these other two languages as my own challenge, but also again, as a way of throwing out ropes and connecting with new people and new ideas.

Catherine Haggarty is a New York based artist, curator, writer and teacher. She’s known for her work that explores the sublime and the absurd through painting. She has an upcoming Solo Show: 'Whatif, youslept?', whichopens February 18th, 2017 at Proto Gallery. She will also be curating a two person painting show, ‘About Looking” featuring the work of Matt Phillips and Travis Fairclough which opens January 27th at Ortega y Gasset Projects through February 19th, 2017.

BrettWallace: Whatisyourorigininart?

Catherine Haggarty: The first thing I did creatively was to build trash and recyclable sculptures in my garage when I was a little kid. I’m the last of seven kids and I was always really like into sports but I also had this urge to make objects. I think maybe similarly to my Dad who used to build a lot of things. And, so the first art thing I did I think was building trash sculptures in my garage when I was about seven or eight.

I don’t think I understood what it would mean to be an artist as a kid, but I knew I wanted to tell stories, to make things, to do what others couldn’t.

BW: Whatdidyoustudyinschool?

CH: I actually focused on Psychology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. I studied Behavioral Psychology but I also majored in art. And when I was in my junior year of college I decided to quit basketball and to pick up an art major and study abroad at the Tyler School of Art in Rome.

I spent a few years after college taking classes at SVA in painting - trying to make up ground for technique work I felt I didn’t get in undergrad because my Psychology major really took up most of my time. Then, around 2009, I began my MFA at Rutgers. That experience was tough but so so helpful - the people I met and had the chance to work with. It challenged and changed me in many really great ways.

BW: Whatexperience(s) ormentors haveinfluencedyou?

CH: Traveling to Rome in 2005 and completing my MFA in 2011 - both of those events solidified my passion and inner desire to dedicate my life to making art. Mentors of great significance were Hanneline Rogeberg, Marc Handleman, Wendy White, and Tom Nozkowski at Rutgers. In 2010 John Yau took a small group of us to studio visits in Brooklyn, we spent time at Kathy Bradford’s studio and that was the start of a friendship and mentorship that continues to be helpful for me.

I remember after a studio visit with Wendy White in graduate school thinking to myself that I could really do this, It just hit me and I never looked back. Seeing working artists with families, lives and success is important for young artists - they need to see that it is possible, and that you can have a rich and full life with art being the center of your drive.

BW: Whoinspiresyou?

CH: So I think there’s like an absurdity in Carroll Dunham’s paintings as well as Nicole Eisenman’s paintings that inspired me to take chances with compositions and figures. Dana Shutz, Nikki Maloof, both paint in this land of figurative abstraction that is really liberating. Brian Scott Campbell’s new work particularly is inspiring to me as well - formally he is coming from drawing but his recent work and implication of figures again really has me looking forward to seeing more of his work. These artists, and many other give me a sort of permission to do what i want. I think that is a huge part of being an artist - allowing yourself the permission to let go and dive in.

I think that there’s a sort of quietude too in artists like Albert York, John Dilg, or Eleanor Ray that I really love formally - I don’t paint like them but they inspire me. The attention to tonal shifts, to simple subject matter lending itself to the everyday and memory.

In terms of painting - there are so many, I look at my friends paintings all the time - we are constantly sending each other photos and of course exchanging studio visits.

I am also really inspired by those that make art from a very different place. I work with kids and young adults when I teach - the way they process information and make art is really curious to me. Impulsivity and simplification of form in children’s art is really terrific if you pay attention to it. Also those students sometimes have cognitive impairments or autism - they inspire me. Truly, some of the best work I see daily is from them. You can’t get more human and more raw than their work. I’m in awe of them for many reasons and it’s a pleasure to be able to experience the way their brain’s work on a daily basis.

BW: Whataresomeoftheconceptsyou'remostinterestedinpainting?

CH: In the past year and a half I’ve really focused on two major sort of subjects, land and people. Psychology has rooted in me a desire to observe and understand behavior - so in this, people have always been a subject. And landscape in the last year has become a subject, which sort of took me by surprise. I always had a bit of anxiety putting my figures or people in places that didn’t make sense. I finally gave myself the permission to put them wherever the hell I felt...and that has been this sort of utopian and dream like landscape. Mountains, water, sky - all of it has seeped into the paintings and really brought me to life in a really hard year.

It has been really liberating and really helpful for me to sort of just have the bravery to put the subjects in an environment, even if it makes no sense at all.

I have been thinking about the sort of suspension of belief - the will it takes to put yourself in a vulnerable place. In running this means committing to complete 26.2 miles in the marathon - in basketball this means driving the lane when you are the smallest one on the court. I’ve been curious how I can do that with painting - how can I be vulnerable, how can I suspend my belief and for a moment - make no sense at all in the painting’s resolution, leave it somewhere I’ve never left it.

BW: Yeah, that makes sense. Now it sounds like you're balancing that focus on people and how they fit in an environment.

CH: Yeah. I mean I have a little note on my desk that says you don’t have to make sense of these. It’s amazing how much you have to remind yourself as an artist - the very simple constructs of making art that is alive and really fresh. You know, that you don’t have to make sense of the image and that that’s not your job.

But for me what I’ve been craving lately is to create something I don’t have. You know, like someplace I don’t have and try to attempt to represent a sort of wavering dream like state. And that takes a little more confidence to create those pictures but that has been really liberating for me. But strangely enough, it kind of came from a sort of place of exhaustion in the past year of just being really busy and a lot of personal stress.

‘The Good World’ 2016, Gouache on panel, 12x12 inches

I remember after the election all I could do was get up and paint small tiny landscape paintings. I just sat there for several weeks and painted land...places I’ve never been, places I will never be. It came from desperation - thinking about the sort of political climate and also some personal stress.

Things have been good - I am so lucky but I also feel the weight of a lot of things, and personally the last year has been so hard. Having lost family members, lost relationships, and seeing my Dad fade from a neurodegenerative disease with no cure...it’s led me to feel like...nothing makes any fucking sense! It is just moments you get - that’s it.

So...back to land. In a way, painting has let me escape and I’ve let go a bit of narrative, and just let paint flow and lead me somewhere more colorful than I feel I have been this year.

So strangely, this is the most colorful, bright and seemingly positive paintings I’ve ever made but it’s come from a place of exhaustion and from loss. They make no sense, which is sort of how I feel about things lately.

‘Land & People’, 2016, Acrylic on wood, 16x18 inches

BW: Is that an intentional dialogue around the political that you're fostering?

CH: Well, I think it is less charged in terms of specific political content - like I’m not making paintings about the President Elect of anything. The culture, the climate of things politically and personally has affected the work in a way though, there is no denying that.

I’ve just let go of whatever I thought was going to make sense or whatever I thought was going to happen. It just seems like none of that has worked. And so I think painting has really just very selfishly become a way to create a world that doesn’t actually exist for me. So yeah, it’s a reaction to the personal and political climate but certainly not an activism reaction if that makes sense.

CH: Oh, thanks. I’m really looking forward to it. So above my desk in my studio I have two things pinned up as a reminder. One is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Whatif, youslept?) and the other is a photo of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier. I keep those up as a personal reminder about the idea of breaking barriers or the idea of the suspension of reality - which both of those images give me.

The poem is really important to me because it sort of paints the picture of a being in a dreamlike state and fully believing that you can be somewhere in your dreams and bring it to your reality when you wake up. So simple, but how beautiful? The sheer will to conjure your dreams into reality. It’s so improbable...but it gives me hope.

So there’s this sort of suspension of belief I think about, when you can convince yourself to believe in the impossible. And I think also this goes back to a personal thing - with athletics - that the commitment to sort of lining up and running 26 miles is insane or to practice dribbling for hours on end until your hands feel like they’re going to fall off. It’s sort of this like belief in your ability to do anything and how important that is even as an artist. To believe in yourself enough to break barriers of logic, what people think you are capable of and most importantly what-ever your perceived barriers are.

The photo of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile is a reminder to me of that sort of commitment and the belief it takes to pursue anything with that much intensity.

It’s like when you’re running ten miles and your body just hits a numb point and you just believe that you could just be an Olympian. Like if you just shut your eyes and pretend...you are in the Olympics, you force yourself to believe that you are that good.

And then so in painting it’s like this idea of like how do you approach a painting and believe that you actually are going to make something worthy of looking. And it’s the same suspension of reality, whether or not it’s a dream or whether or not it’s like an hour into your run where your body’s numb and you just start to believe that you’re actually in the Olympics. And you’re just, you’re still so average, you know, but it’s this sort of reminder to push yourself toward the thing. And even if they don’t make sense, you know, but to make yourself continue to try to do that. It’s really humbling and also is a really good way to let go of control?

Studio picture courtesy of the artist

BW: How does this idea of the suspension of reality influence how you work, the way your studio is set up, the tools that you use etc?

CH: So I draw all the time, on the train, in the morning with coffee and such that note taking is really important to my observational process. So everything really starts from that and paying really close attention to the world that I live in. Years ago I took a class at SVA with Nancy Chunn, and the most important thing I took from her class was to simply ‘notice what you notice’. And I tell my students this and I remind myself every day to do this. If you closely pay attention to the constant thread of observations you make therein lies some really rich content about what’s important - what stands out to you.

There is a set of characters that sort of reoccur over the past ten years for me and they are mainstays and sometimes I add a new one. So the paintings start from movement and from drawing from those recurring characters. Really boiling down what I’m noticing and why I’m noticing it and what kind of picture I want to make with those characters and how much control I want to have.

‘For the Victors’ 2017, Acrylic on Panel, 12x12 inches

CH: Yeah. Well there’s always a state of flow with anything, right, and we all know that. We can get to that state of flow by just being really locked into it, having no distractions. But, you know, I listen to music and I listen to podcasts a lot and I think that the best working time for me is when I’m not distracted by a cell phone or by people. And I just get a few hours in of kind of like circling the studio and making adjustments to several things at once and really connecting the synapses. And that’s when the work actually really starts to break more barriers than if I’m just focusing on one painting and thinking about the idea of resolution.

But if I let myself go and kind of circle the studio organically, you know, more connections happen.

CH: There was a pivot from moving from oils to now I only use water based paint. I’m starting to use metallic paint, a lot of neon paint and I’ve actually really craved color, like more than I’ve ever craved it. And I’m using that I think more freely. I feel like there’s no rules and using water based paint and inks and acrylics has actually freed me up a lot to just do, to let go of things. Because my prep is so much shorter and I can just work faster and that suits my nature I think better.

Color has been another escape for me, like much like land was an escape in terms of trying to create a space that I didn’t know physically. Color has been an escape for me psychologically to just sort of let go. And I just needed bright colors this year.

BW: Couldyoutalkabouttheshowopeningthisweekyou'vecurated?

CH: Yeah, I’m curating a show at Ortega y Gasset. It’s my first curatorial project with the gallery so I’m really excited for it. It opens January 27th and runs through February 19th. It features the work of Matt Phillips and Travis Fairclough - both friends and painters I greatly admire. The title of the show is, “About Looking” in honor of the recent passing of the great John Berger. When thinking of a title for this show, I felt that it was an appropriate and timely one that not only gives a nod to a literary legend but also reflects a specific pace and presence in Fairclough and Phillip’s paintings.

BW: How do you thinkpaintingchangingvis-a-vistheconstantproliferationofdigitalimagesweseeneveryday? Isthatapartofhowyou'rethinking about show, "AboutLooking"?

CH: Well there are two answers to that question but first in regards to the show and the decision to choose these artists together.

I had a studio visit weeks ago with Travis Fairclough and I have been watching his work develop for two years. I knew I wanted to show his work and in the middle of the visit, when we were talking about the presence and forms in his painting - it just hit me. That pace was important to him - pace in making and pace in viewing. This has to be somewhat a reaction to the world we live in digitally but also this echoes a painting philosophy reflecting a sort of spirituality within abstraction.

I left the studio visit thinking about his desire to turn our attention back to the painting - and not ourselves. With Travis, there is this commitment so intense to the kind of attention he gives his color choice, his compositions, his drawings - it’s beautiful. I left knowing I wanted to reach out to Matt Phillips.

I have seen Matt’s work for years at Steve Harvey Projects and various shows around the city - so I was familiar for certain. When I left Travis’s studio that day I couldn’t immediately think of anyone making paintings just like him, but my focus became about pace and presence within abstraction and who would be an interesting pair to show together. I immediately emailed Matt for a studio visit.

‘Dial’ 2017, pigment and silica on linen 30x 24 inches

Seeing Matt Phillip’s work up close is a lesson in rhythm, care, color and most certainly pace. His brush work slows you down and doesn’t let you assume the closure or resolution of the image. In a way, the method Phillip’s uses to apply paint mirrors the way Fairclough forms his compositions. A sort of restructuring of our ability to work through an image. They are doing things in a shared pool of thinking but with different solutions, processes and even material. Phillips uses pigment and silica on linen and Fairclough uses only oil on linen.

I think that, you know, it’s fair to say if you look at Matt Phillips work enough that his images sort of bounce and they ungulate on the canvas because of the rhythmic method in which he applies paint. Even in my studio visit with him, I sort of said to him joking that these paintings kind of look like it could have been a ‘90s screensaver. We both laughed,...There seems to be a need for this human connection in his work and process. He has mentioned to me that his application of paint stems from an interest in imbuing a painting with the hand, touch and gesture.

Travis’s work might be a complete philosophical slowdown to the pace of image making today and his use of color and brush work is completely different than Matt’s color and brushwork. I believe he is making his paintings with similar things in mind as Phillips but it is shown differently - which is why I think they are a great combination.

I just finished installing the work and I stood back and have to say, I am so proud to share their work together. I can’t believe these two, although familiar with each other, have never met. They live a few miles apart in Brooklyn and you just won’t believe the kind of connection there is. It’s breathtaking - the line in their work flows around Ortega y Gasset’s space effortlessly. The presence of forms recurring and shifting in our perceived space is truly stunning. The kind of work curating takes is the reward of time spent developing a Gallery and of the rich art community we are in. Since Matt is a member of Tiger Strikes Astroid, I am sure he shares this sentiment with me.

Travis Fairclough, 2016, ‘Dualist Affect’, Oil on Linen 22x18 inches

In terms of my idea of the painting in the digital era, I think it’s so nuanced but it’s not a topic that is going to change. The internet is art. Our perceptions and ability to read images is a reflection of living in the internet age, whether we like it or not. The internet and the influx of digital images might be the greatest influence in the postmodern era in painting I can think of.

I am not sure we can even keep up with it, maybe that’s why everyone seems overwhelmed and why paintings matter more and more. I think we are lucky though, we get to see a lot - we can’t avoid it. We are constantly confronted with information - unless we slow it down ourselves.

I think painters are either offering us a break from the pace of technology or they’re offering us a commentary on that technology. And I think those are two rich avenues and either one is worthy of someone’s time.

CH: Yeah, it’s totally different. And I think that’s actually the beauty of it. I think, you know, I’m glad the internet’s there. I think it’s part of our art now. I don’t think we can escape it anymore, ‘nor should we try to.

BW: Howdoyoubalanceeverything?

CH: Oh gosh. I don’t know, Brett... a lot of coffee. I think there’s a lot of people that are ultra-busy and ultra-involved. And so I think the art world is full of probably the hardest workers I am privileged to even know. So many people like yourself have full-time jobs and families and careers. And I just think I’m in awe of the people that I get to be surrounded by.

In terms of my life, it’s just the way it is. I have to teach but I also love to teach and I’m privileged to do so. But, you know, every once in awhile I get kind of exhausted...particularly this year. It is what it is though, and I think everything influences my work at this point. And so I can take two avenues in attitude about how much I do…

One is to say ‘I am exhausted and it’s a burden to teach and make art full time’. Or I can take the perspective that I am incredibly privileged and I’m lucky to be in the position I am. I choose to take the latter because I just think there’s no other way. And I’m not going to spend eight hours of my day teaching children art and think that it’s a waste of my time. It’s my obligation to sort of synthesize the experiences I have as rich content. And so that inspires me and it also influences my work. In terms of curating, that’s a total privilege and a joy to be able to bring some attention to artists I think is needed or would serve as a great show. So that’s the fun part - that is the reward.

I do think though, it is good to simplify at times. I have months that are full force - like now. I’m swamped but then...things will slow down and I will have more time alone to paint and be a little bit more of a human. I have built my life the way it is, and I’m getting better at simplifying things even if it seems like a lot. I really enjoy my quiet nights of painting more than ever.

BW: Whatdoyoureflectonoutsideofthestudio? Howdoyoustayinformed?

CH: In a way I don’t know that I have a ton of time to read like I want to. But I did just start a book called Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. I’m really excited to read that. I’m also reading a book called JustKids - the story of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. I love Cabinet Magazine as well.

Art Magazines, podcasts, NPR, and music keep me going. Because of how busy I am I do rely more on podcasts because my interest lies so much in human behavior, education and philosophy that I think those are actually huge influences to me more than even just looking at art in a museum. I’m really interested in how to connect my language of image making to things that are more complex and relate to the world at large.

BW: Whoaresomeoftheartistsonyourradarthisyear?

CH: I was recently a visiting critic at The Wassaic Project and got to have studio visit with some great artists. Ellen Jing Xu, a recent MFA Graduate from University of Washington is making some really exciting work. I also met with Tiffany Marie Tate, based in Philadelphia and thought her work is really exciting. I look forward to following both of them - everyone should!

Lauren Whearty is a friend and painter based in Philadelphia who I watch and talk to often, her paintings are taking off so I am looking forward to seeing her show more often. Liv Aanrud, a close friend and terrific artist is based in L.A and is truly next level - her textile and rag rugs come from a place of compulsion and energy that is raw and beautiful. She leaves us with paintings in thread form, woven and fought for.

Andrew Phillip Cortez, also based in L.A is someone to watch as well. He is making work a bit off the radar which is why it is so exciting. I spent time with him in L.A. this summer and collaborating and that experience out West and his friendship has really influenced my color palette and thought process. There are so many....it could go on and on, and I’m thankful for that.

Ultimately, I want to surround myself with terrific artists because it makes me better. I want others to succeed as much as I want to - I want to learn from others as much as I want to teach them. Across the board - remaining open is so important.

Jennifer Samet is a New York-based art historian, curator, and writer. She teaches at the New York Studio School and The New School. She has lectured at universities across the country on the subject of “The Role of Empathy in Art” and “Slow Art.” She curated major historical exhibitions on Jane Street Group and the history of the New York Studio School; and thematic exhibitions such as “Rough Cut,” “Repetitive Motion,” and “Physical Painting.” She is the author of the column “Beer with a Painter,” in Hyperallergic Weekend Edition.

Jennifer Samet, in Truro, Massachusetts, for "Beer with a Painter" interview with Sharon Horvath.

Brett Wallace: What was your origin in art?

Jennifer Samet: I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs. I remember being conscious, even as a child, that there wasn’t a lot of culture around me. Culture was definitely part of my parents’ life. But outside of that, it wasn’t there. So I vividly remember the pleasure of going to New York, to the Metropolitan Museum with my mother, and looking at Pollock paintings.

There were art books in my house, and I remember a book about Karel Appel, and a box set of thin books. There was one about Cézanne in there. It was very digestible for a kid, because it only had about ten reproductions. My mother went to art school and she painted. She didn’t really paint professionally after I was born. But she had studied painting in Boston.

My parents took us to a lot of classical music – Carnegie Hall and special matinees at the Philharmonic that were family-friendly. We went to Tanglewood every summer and would listen to concerts and picnic on the lawn. So it was just this high culture. My parents only let me watch PBS and I was totally sheltered from popular culture. It was extreme!

BW: How would you describe your roles today?

JS: I always say that I work with art in a few different capacities. So I teach Art History and I write about art, and I’m also Co-Director of the gallery Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

BW: Could we talk about your Ph.D. dissertation (which seems very relevant to your focus on painting today)?

JS: It was called “Painterly Representation in New York: 1945 to 1975.” I wrote about a generation of painters, many of whom studied with abstract painters, in particular, Hans Hofmann. So they started out making abstract paintings, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, but they ended up becoming figurative or representational.

That was the generation I wrote about. It’s not really a group, per se. But a lot of them knew each other and were in conversation. It includes people like Mercedes Matter, who was, along with a group of her students, the founder of the New York Studio School; Robert de Niro, Sr.; and Louisa Matthiasdottir.

Photo: Nicolas Carone, In Orbit, 2007, Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 60 in., part of "The Space Between," curated by Jennifer Samet for the New York Studio School, February - March 2015

BW: And, did you find it interesting that abstraction originally came out of figuration (as in the case of Picasso deconstructing the image or De Kooning moving from the figure to abstraction)?

JS: Yes, abstraction was the zeitgeist, and considered the highest form of progress in art. It was the way to go. And there was an intellectual underpinning to all of it. Some of those artists, like Nell Blaine, for example, started out being very dogmatic about abstraction. So it’s an interesting shift, to then give up all of the polemical reasoning behind it and start painting flowers again. Sometimes, when things become too extreme, that is one reaction. Anything can become an academy.

This group came out of nonobjective art and Mondrian, and people from the Abstraction-Création group in France, like Jean Hélion. So, in part, they were coming out of the 1930s and 1940s abstraction movements. They also studied with Hofmann, of course, who was called the Father of Abstract Expressionism.

BW: Let’s talk about your own conversation series, Beer with a Painter. What’s your vision for this ongoing project?

JS: There’s always been a really specific vision to “Beer with a Painter.” Even though it has that playful title, it comes out of something serious. It’s that I believe that what I call “the voice of the artist” is becoming lost in art history. I think it’s an untold art history right now. This relates to my idea that when things become too extreme, they are problematic.

Art History right now, and this has been going on for at least fifty years, is focused on socio-political methodology, which is indeed important and valid. But when things become too extreme, you lose other things. I would say that you are losing sight of the fact that the artist is not just a product of his or her sociological and political context, but also an individual. And you’re not really looking at the work of art itself from any kind of formal, material perspective.

Art historians are looking at it more from a literary perspective. Art historians traditionally had a background in making art themselves, but increasingly they don’t. So they are often great at writing and understanding the context of the art. But, increasingly, what was known as “connoisseurship” – a big part of 19th Century art history – is no longer valued. I noticed this when I was working on my Ph.D.

After I finished it, I wanted to get back into that place where I was really listening to the “voice of the artist.” To me, this is two-fold. It’s the literal voice of the artist, and also listening to the work of art, as a visual object.

BW: Nicely said.

JS: So, that’s what “Beer with a Painter” came out of. It was also just about having fun with art again. Because I had lost that initial thing we were talking about from childhood. The pleasure aspect had slipped away, and it had become something else. Also, since I had always done interviews, a friend, the painter Ryan Cobourn, advised me, “You should make them more rambling, more informal. You should do them over beer.”

Then, the weird thing was that a year or two later, another friend, Kyle Staver, suggested I do interviews over beer, and call it “Beer with a Painter.” Once it was suggested by multiple people, I started it. The first one was with Matt Phillips; shortly after, was Sharon Horvath. Then it was picked up by Hyperallergic. I’m lucky that Hyperallergic, and my Weekend Edition editors, John Yau and Thomas Micchelli, have been so supportive, and given me a platform and a lot of creative control. It’s a gift.

Photo: Jennifer Samet with Mary Heilmann in her Bridgehampton studio for an interview, January 2013

BW: What are the dimensions by you define painter or painting by?

JS: I would say it is artists who are dedicated to the material and medium of painting. Maybe you are doing unconventional things with it (I curated a show about this, called “Physical Painting”), but there still is that focus on paint. We are still in a culture of “post-studio” work, so the studio work, and painting itself, is my focus in these interviews.

The reason that I have made it “Beer with a Painter,” as opposed to other artists is that I thought that contemporary painting wasn’t being given the attention, institutionally - within the museum world, and art historically. Painting is also the thing that I personally get the most excited about; I feel the most attached to; and I know more about painting than I do other media. So I have the most to offer other people when I’m writing about painting. Contemporary painting was the thing that I thought needed more attention from an art historical lens.

Photo: Installation of "Physical Painting," curated by Jennifer Samet in conversation with Scott Wolniak, for the Maass Gallery, Purchase College, February - March 2016

BW: How do you think new technologies have changed the audience for painting? I’m thinking about Paul Virilio’s controversial argument in The Accident of Art. Virilio and Hobsbawn raised the notion in that essay that Disney has surpassed Monet in the ability to reach the masses and create change in the world (Lotringer, Sylvelre, and Paul Virilion. The accident of Art. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2005. Print.)

JS: I’m aware that what I’m doing has a very specific and small audience within the context of our entire cultural production. This is a small world, the amount of people who really care about painting, the way that I do, and the way that all of the people I talk to do! I want my writing to be accessible, but at the same time, you still have to be a pretty interested reader, to read a 3,000-word interview with a painter - even if it’s with someone really well-known. So in that sense, I don’t think that painting can compete with pop music, in terms of the audience that it reaches. But I still think it’s really important, and I still have a lot of faith in it and belief in it.

I don’t care that Disney has more of an audience or that Kanye West has more of an audience. I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter, in terms of what I’m saying. Painting is still important. Even if there is a really small audience for an artist, it still may be important.

I think it touches a significant number of people. I think that artists have a lot of power, to influence culture, politics, the world, and the fabric of New York City, for example. I don’t go so far as to say that art alone can effect change, but I think artists make propositions, and I think painting can offer a new way of seeing. These are actually ideas that Angela Dufresne and Terry Winters discussed in our conversations.

It is distressing how many artists have been pushed out of our city - out of Manhattan and into the boroughs, and out of the boroughs, into other places. I think artists have a huge impact on the lives of all kinds of people, whether they realize it or not.

BW: Yeah. And, it is happening to galleries too. I was reading an article in Artnet today by Christian Viveros-Faune about the squeeze of mid-market galleries.

JS: It’s become really hard, and there are a lot of galleries closing right now. I wish the city were making more of an effort to subsidize and help artists and small galleries.

JS: The talk that I gave about empathy in art came out of an idea of Hans Hofmann. I wrote a lot about Hofmann and his teaching, and specifically this book that he wrote and rewrote over a period of 40 years, and which still hasn’t been published, called “The Painter’s Primer.” There is a whole section in it about empathy. It is a philosophical idea that factored into the work of German art historians, such as Wilhelm Worringer.

That’s what I was speaking about, but I do think it has that broader implications for me, and how I write about art. Going back to my mother, she died when I was 13 years old. So in some way, I think all of the work that I’ve done has been devotional or dedicated to her. As I said, she stopped making painting when she had children. Not to be too grandiose, but I’ve always wanted part of my contribution to be about helping artists continue to make art, rather than stop.

So, in some sense, the interviews come out of that spirit. I don’t think of myself as an investigative reporter. I’m not trying to dig up dirt, although I do want them to be something the artist hasn’t said before. I want them to provide insight the audience has not already had into the work. But I want the artists to consider the interviews a statement they are happy to put into the world. The interviews are more about identification between two people, and having a conversation that’s real. I want them to read as an experience between two people, which they are.

I want them to be personal. When you have an open dialogue and bring that kind of openness, or as my friend, the archivist Jean-Noël Herlin calls it — “a generous eye” —to looking at art, it usually adds a lot of dimension to the work.

I don’t think you have to know all about an artist to love their work, or you have to love the person to love their work. But I think it adds a dimension. To go back to my “untold art history” idea — the artist is an individual, as well as a product of their time.

BW: How do you see established models of painting, such as the artist-as-hero, shifting to new models?

JS: Well, I think it’s complicated. The artist-as-hero archetype comes out of a very specific moment in time. In fact, some of my favorite moments in interviews I’ve done are when artists have talked about their work as not being about him or herself, but, rather, about something larger. Glenn Goldberg spoke about this, in our interview, and also Susan Walp, and others that I’m forgetting right now.

The artist Peter Acheson is such a smart person who I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from. He’s talked about the artist–as-hero archetype changing over time, so that now the predominant archetype is the artist-as-trickster. My interpretation is that in the days where existentialism was the reigning philosophy of art-making, every mark and move by the artist was considered important, and carried so much weight. But the artist can also be someone who actually disrupts society through more playful means. He is referring to the role of the trickster in a society. He or she does things to create disruption, effect change, and influence how people see. Acheson talked about how that archetype manifests aesthetically in the work.

For example, you were talking about smaller galleries. Nowadays, artists are doing a lot of very interesting projects in alternative spaces, exhibitions outdoors, projects in spaces where art “shouldn’t” be - lots of pop-up shows. And of course there is street art. I think of it as the artist-as-trickster, and I’m a big fan! I’m all for artists making things happen out of their own vision and energy, especially as a way to react to the increasing 1% nature of the art world: mega-galleries and museums focused on drawing bigger and bigger crowds. There is so much art buried in the basements of museums and in storage spaces, which never gets shown. Chris Martin talked about this in the interview we did.

JS: I think our social media culture has a big impact on people’s art, whether they’re using actual visual images sourced from the Internet, or their aesthetics are affected by the Internet and social media. It manifests aesthetically as a fracturing of forms, or work that has overlays, a multiplicity of images and elements crowded together. It reflects our culture where we are subject to image overload, a constant, overwhelming stream of visual information. I think almost any artist that I could name is somehow drawing on that, or using social media as an important mode of communication.

BW: There’s also some artists who look at their work as a resting place away from the digital saturation.

JS: Definitely, yes. Well, another lecture that I’ve given is titled “Slow Art: Looking at Painting in a Culture of Distraction.” It’s about how we are used to looking at things really quickly. We have to move really quickly, and we are always multi-tasking, visually and otherwise. Even when we watch a movie, we tend to be doing two other visual things at the same time. I feel like I rarely have the kind of experience I used to, where I would go to a movie theater, or screen a movie at home, and only watch that. It is much more common that we’re watching television on our laptop, and looking at our phones and checking social media and email simultaneously.

You were asking about the audience. There’s a reason that painting is hard to look at, and it’s because it takes time and concentration. You have to give it a different kind of attention. I think that’s why there is a relatively small audience for it. Who really has the patience?! Even for us, the people who work in the art world, make objects, or write about them, it still can be hard.

I still tell myself to put away my phone, while I’m in a museum, because otherwise, I won’t really look in the way I want to. It’s hard for very seasoned people who love painting.

Photo: Installation of "Repetitive Motion," curated by Jennifer Samet for SHFAP at Projector Gallery, March - April 2014

BW: Could we talk about the importance of this upcoming show you co-curated with Michael David at David & Schweitzer Contemporary?

JS: Yes. I know that sometimes, when there is a dramatic political moment, like we are experiencing right now, there can be a feeling that art-making doesn’t matter as much as actions like calling on your Congress people, which obviously is really important right now. But I think that art is important, too.

So, for myself, right after the Election, I was looking at social media and still going out to look at art. I found it comforting to look at images and work by women artists who were dealing with the body. Because, for me, and for a lot of people, a very big disappointment was that our country elected someone who bragged about sexual assault. People basically said that was okay, they would vote for him anyway.

It was like making women’s issues, and women’s bodies, invisible and unimportant. So, right after the election, in just the week that followed, I knew, even subconsciously, that looking at body-based imagery by women was giving me comfort. It felt important to be looking at it, and I was really grateful that it was out there for me.

I had also gone to this protest in October that was called “Pussy Power at Trump Tower.” And it was a really wonderful moment, in the whole election process, where I felt like good, old-fashioned feminist rage and power was back in the world.

It was the same night as the third debate, and Hillary answered a question about Roe v. Wade. She gave a powerful statement about choice and the mother, and the health decisions of the woman being of ultimate importance. It felt like a big moment. She was strong and unapologetic. She wasn’t pulling any punches. I loved listening to her that night. So the idea for the show came out of those things.

Also, Michael David and I had already been talking about collaborating on a project, which was related to women artists and the body, somehow. So, I wrote to him and said, “What do you think about doing a show called ‘#PUSSYPOWER’?” And he immediately responded, “Yes.” There was no hesitation. He was on board. We started putting it together immediately.

It’s a really big show – with over 40 artists. It includes pioneer feminist artists, such as Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke, next to younger artists, such as Giordanne Salley. We are trying to show a range of artists who are dealing with the body and feminism right now. I tried to include some of the artist-activists who were important to me pre-Election Day.

BW: Yes, people having a voice and thinking and acting beyond the studio walls.

JS: Yes. Wendy White, for example, is someone who had a really interesting project. She was cataloguing and posting on Facebook all the examples of misogynist statements and rhetoric that were happening during the campaign. I thought that was really important, a great project.

JS: Yes, it’s been the critics and the curators, too. The “Dear Ivanka” protest was organized by curator Alison Gingeras. Walter Robinson is an example of an artist-critic who was posting all throughout the campaign and primaries in support of Hillary. Jerry Saltz has been an important voice. After the election, he was telling artists to use the anger and energy in their studio, and telling people to continue to go out and look at art. His words also became a motivator for the show. Saltz, in fact, I think, utilizes the critic-as-trickster model; he uses provocative methods to get attention for his writing. People say it’s narcissistic or just to get attention for himself. But I don’t think so. I think he is quite aware that it is bigger than himself.

BW: Jen, what’s in store for you in 2017? What are you most hopeful about?

JS: Well, honestly, it’s a tough time to be super hopeful. I’m hoping we all survive the Trump era. But I have exciting exhibitions I’ve started to work on for Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, like a show of the Texas-based painter Sedrick Huckaby. And I’m grateful that I spend a good portion of my life looking at and thinking about painting. It is endlessly engaging to me.

The following post is part of "The Conversation Project," a series of interviews with influencers in the contemporary art world.

Paul D’Agostino is a prolific artist, writer, translator, curator and professor living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he has been producing art exhibitions and critical discussions at Centotto Gallery since 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian Literature and is currently a member of the part-time Art Faculty at Parsons The New School for Design, and MFA Writing Advisor at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. He also recently joined the part-time faculty of NYU’s School of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting. He also recently joined the part-time faculty of NYU’s School of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting. In the spring of 2017, he will be visiting critic and exhibition curator for the MFA program at CUNY-Queens College.

D'Agostino has taught, writes in and translates a number of languages, primarily Italian, German, French, Spanish and English, and he does translation work in several other languages as well. He is co-founder of and writer for two art blogs, ART(inter) and After Vasari, and Assistant Editor of Journal of Italian Translation. He was also until recently Art Editor at Brooklyn Magazine / The L Magazine. He has a pet turtle named Cecco Angiolieri, who might both outgrow and outlive him. You can follow D'Agostino on Instagram and Twitter @postuccio.

My conversations with D’Agostino took place over the course of an afternoon in three different settings: in his Bushwick studio; at Studio 10 Gallery, where he had recently mounted the first version of a large Centotto group show called NOMENCoLorATURE; and in a car en route to a Norte Maar dance performance at Socrates Sculpture Park.

PART 1: IN THE CAR

BW: How did you get involved in art?

PD: Well, I've been making art my entire life. I made art with my sisters starting when we were very young. It was one of the things that we did at home together all the time, and with our grandmother. My family moved around a lot, so my sisters and I spent a lot of time together—maybe more than siblings tend to if they grow up in one place, each with his or her own set of friends. We didn't really have that one place, so our best friends were one another, basically.

So we made a lot of art together, and all three of us were accepted into a gifted and talented art school when we were very young. It was part of the public school system where we grew up in Virginia Beach. So we all went there in addition to regular public school. We inspired one another all the time and were exposed to so much at such young ages. Already in fourth grade, for example, we had three-hour studio drawing sessions. Then lunch. And then an art history class, and then more studio in the afternoon. And this is fourth grade! So the kind of exposure we had to making and studying art at a really young age was the kind of exposure you might usually get when you’re quite a bit older.

The school is called Old Donation Center for the Gifted and Talented, and I went there from elementary through high school. Since it was part of the public school system, the way it was structured in elementary school was that you went to this school one full day per week, and then you went to your other school the rest of the week. In middle and high school, you’d take classes at ODC into the evening right after regular school. At least that’s how it worked back then. We moved around in Virginia Beach and changed schools a lot, but that one was consistent.

So in fifth, sixth, seventh grades, we're doing things like metalsmithing, photography, plastic resin sculpture, all kinds of stuff. There were sculpture rooms, darkrooms. We were making pieces on the potter's wheel in elementary school. To be allowed to make stuff on the potter's wheel, we had to prove that we could do 50 pushups.

BW: To compress the clay?

PD: Yeah. Our teacher said if you're not strong enough to hold the clay in place, then you're not going to be able to make anything on the potter's wheel. So I got exposed to all kinds of different materials, all kinds of different creative modes. And I was so young that I wasn’t even aware of disciplinary divisions or anything like that. It was all just art, and maybe this is why I still don't separate things in my mind. Materials aside, what I did in those long drawing or painting sessions was like the things that I was doing in the long sculpture sessions. Studying art history was part of the daily schedule, so that also seemed the same to me as making art, in a way.

So that’s probably a very significant reason why I'm not totally faithful to any particular medium. It's probably why I enjoy so much the teaching I do at Parsons, where I'm exposing students to conceptual ways of making visual artwork as opposed to just the practical, technical ways. It's probably also why I enjoy writing about art. And so on.

So the simple background for me with art is that it goes back as far as I do. I used to make pieces, then write stories to go with them, and I still do that in a lot of my work. My sisters are artists and have made art their whole lives, so we always pushed one another. They had their own styles and preferences, and I had my own, and we kind of overlapped in certain ways but not in others. There are things about their work that I've always admired. I don’t know if they've ever admired anything about my work, but that's a different discourse.

In the studio at 56 Bogart

BW: How many sisters do you have?

PD: Two. Julia, three years older, and Melissa, three years younger. They're the greatest.

BW: Your pedigree in writing is really important to your work. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how it has brought linguistics into your work?

PD: Well, it's kind of a long story, and part of it is about the fact that I wasn't planning on going to college after high school. I wasn't. I was graduating near the top of my class, my grade point average was over 4, et cetera, but I was also very serious about skateboarding at the time. I was competing and stuff like that, and I wanted to move to California to see how far I could go with it—to at least give it a shot for a couple of years, you know? I was very good at studying, and I loved school, but my thinking was: ‘I'm doing this skateboarding thing, I've been doing it for a long time, I'm getting pretty good at it, and I'm gonna go for it and move to California.’ Because that's kind of what you did back then if you were going to get serious about skateboarding. California was the real base of the whole industry at the time, and in general you can skate year-round there. This was long before there were these cushy skateparks everywhere!

So that was my plan. But then I had a really bad injury my senior year of high school. Far worse than all the other bad injuries I'd had and just shrugged off for many years. So, because it was so bad, and because I couldn't skateboard at all for a long time, I was like, ‘I guess I should go to college.’ So I applied to architecture programs at art schools, because I thought that's the direction I wanted to go with my art, and to some liberal arts schools. I had always been really into designing houses, even when I was like six years old. There are all these drawings that I did of entire homes, to scale and everything. Full renderings of beach houses that I wanted to build for my parents. ‘One day when I'm rich,’ I’d say, ‘I’ll build you this house.’

Then I started to change my mind about art schools. My older sister was in college at the time, in the BFA program at VCU. She was telling me stories about art school. She was like, ‘Paul, I'm doing these studio drawing classes. It's what we did in fourth grade. It's what we did in fifth grade. It's what we did in sixth grade. I'm taking this sculpture class. It's like I have to go through all the basics.’ She's a really amazing artist with a really creative mind, so I was kind of blown away that she was feeling bored, going through the lessons that she had gone through so long ago.

So I thought, ‘I'm not gonna do that!’ I was really into math. I loved calculus. I loved all my math classes in high school. So I was thinking about majoring in math, which in a way is also why I was interested in architecture. Then I ended up just looking more into liberal arts schools, which got me thinking that I also wanted to study more languages. At the time, I had been studying German for several years. So I thought the way to broaden things for me would be to do liberal arts, and I figured I could always do art anyway. That’s kind of what my sister was conveying to me. She got way more into her studies once she got into the more advanced courses, and definitely when she went on to an MFA program.

My primary major in college was European Studies. I double majored. European Studies and Italian Language and Literature. But I also wanted to do some studio art courses, so I talked to some of the art professors. I said, ‘I can show you a portfolio or something. I don't need to take the basic drawing class before I take the painting class.’ Usually they were like, ‘No problem.’ This was at William & Mary. I took a lot of art history courses there too. The studio art professors were very cool, and the classrooms were wonderful, tons of natural light pouring into a beautiful building kind of built up on stilts over lake Matoaka.

BW: William & Mary is pretty well known for its academic excellence.

PD: Yeah, you could say that. It's the second oldest school in the country. There was Harvard and then William and Mary, and William and Mary was the first state school, as I understand it, the first public school. It still is a state school, but it's also pretty small. And they really work you hard there. That's for sure. Anyway, that's where my decision to pursue studies in liberal arts in general as opposed to art specifically took me.

I did European Studies, which was then part of the International Studies/International Relations major, because of its mix of disciplines and significant foreign language requirements. And because I thought I wanted to work for the State Department. I did end up doing that a little bit. I worked for the State Department for two summers, at the American Consulate in Florence, Italy.

So I got a taste of it. But then I decided that I didn't want to pursue a career that made me climb a ladder. State Department has a lot of that. Basically you have to work for something like ten years before you can officially have the job that I had as a 20 year-old. It was an internship my first summer, and they gave me extra responsibilities because of my language skills. And then I was taken on as a temporary hire my second summer. Always an adjunct!

So in college I was doing a lot with languages, literature and international studies. I also lived and studied abroad a couple times. I studied in Germany, and then I started teaching German at William & Mary. And then I started studying Italian, then studied and lived in Italy. And then I started teaching Italian as well. I was a TA for Italian and German.

BW: Wow. This is undergrad still.

PD: Yeah. So then I got a taste for teaching. I realized around then that I really like being able to add more to what I do while still making art. I never had to or wanted to abandon any of it. I was getting into my own creative writing then too. I felt that if I could continue adding things, then why not?

BW: Skill acquisition becomes addictive in a way.

PD: You just keep doing it, keep adding.

Discussing paintings at 56 Bogart

BW: It's interesting, because you've been acquiring languages and skills that are somewhat divergent and not along some linear track.

PD: I guess it's a pretty big spread. But I loved studying. I loved writing papers. I loved learning new stuff. I got a taste of teaching and started really liking that. And I had that exposure with the State Department at the end of college, and even though I really liked the jobs I had at the Consulate, I knew I didn't want to do the ladder-climbing thing.

I also just wanted to keep learning, keep studying, so I decided to go directly into grad school to pursue a PhD. Then it became a matter just of focusing, of deciding which thing, which discipline.

BW: And what did you focus on in grad school?

PD: Italian literature, which is kind of funny because I ended up entering a PhD program for Italian literature after only studying Italian for three years. I started studying it as a sophomore in college. But that's what I chose to focus on because of where everything else led me, and because I kept thinking I could pursue other things on my own anyway. And grad school was great. The new level of focus in a particular field was exhilarating because you get this feeling of coming to know something through and through. I did my PhD, and MA as well, at Rutgers University. They have a really old, quite large Italian Department there. It's really traditionally structured, or at least it was while I was there, such that some people thought it was old school. It is, or was. But I was cool with that. The old school model for PhD programs in literature in a certain language generally involved studying that literature in its entirety. So for my degree, I basically had to study all of Italian literature. The reading list was beautifully ridiculous, and it included stuff from the 1100s, like the early little tracings of things written in a kind of proto-Italian.

So it was tons of reading, tons of writing papers, and I just loved it. I really got a high out of going to the library or elsewhere to read, dig in. Looking at the reading list didn't make me think, 'I have to read all of this?' Instead, I thought, 'I get to read all of this! I will have read all of this!' So grad school gave me this other thing, this feeling of knowing something in such breadth and depth that it became another major part of me.

After grad school I was teaching part-time and working some other odd jobs—barista at a coffee shop, door guy at a bar, so great what you can do with a PhD—and then I had a chance to move to Paris for a while to live with a friend of mine from grad school, Bruno. He's a physicist and was on a post-doc there at the time. Now he's in São Paulo.

Anyway, the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick is really close to NYC, just a quick train ride away, so I came to the city on a very regular basis back then, once a week or so to check out Chelsea galleries, see films, attend talks and suchlike. I knew then that I wanted to move to NYC at some point. But with this opportunity in Paris, I thought, 'I'm going to do that, then come back and move to New York.' So I did that, then moved to New York immediately.

In the studio at 56 Bogart

BW: Was that 2007?

PD: Yeah, summer 2007. And pretty quickly after settling in I realized that this is the place where I can do everything I like doing, and meet and work with a lot of people who also work like that. I didn't know many people when I first arrived—a few writer friends, a few artist friends, some fellow linguists and translators, some skater friends—but I felt that if I engaged in my mixed bag of things here in any way, there will be a sympathy for that, rather than an aversion to it.

Then I started to do exhibits at Centotto, and that soon became a place where I could merge lots of my activities. I didn’t really start it with that intention, but that became apparent to me the longer I did it, that this is how everything is going to make sense. This is how I can tap into most all of my interests, and in a way that is productive and beneficial to lots of artists.

PD: Well, I think English Kills is closed down now, so I suppose Centotto is now the oldest still-running art space in Bushwick. There were other galleries in Bushwick before us. Or at least one, basically. It was called Ad Hoc, and it was a street art gallery that opened a couple years before EK and Centotto. Norte Maar had a base in Bushwick around then, and they began operating as a gallery too in 2009 I believe. Pocket Utopia came in around that time as well. Then Factory Fresh opened, and there were some other galleries like Pioneer and Sugar. At that time there were also a lot of places that were just art spaces on occasion, not necessarily galleries in any sort of proper way. A number of music venues like that back then as well. The regularity of Bushwick Open Studios and other Arts in Bushwick events, like BETA Spaces and SITE Fest, allowed for people to kind of casually operate art spaces during neighborhood-wide things like that. They didn't really have to bother with a name or program. The bigger events embraced everything.

BW: Bushwick Open Studios must have come about in about that same time, right? In 2007 or 2006?

PD: The first Bushwick Open Studios was 2006, but it wasn't done by Arts in Bushwick. It was some other group of artists, as I understand, and pretty successful albeit kind of casual. Then Arts in Bushwick formed and did BOS in 2007. Spring of 2008 is when I started to put together Centotto, and the first show there was for Bushwick Open Studios 2008.

In the studio

BW: Did you have a program in mind as you started?

PD: No. I started it because I had some friends who were finishing their MFAs at Brooklyn College at the time, and I figured I'd put up some of their work and some of mine, and we'd just see how it went. I was working at Brooklyn College back then—adjunct professor in the Modern Languages Department, writing advisor in the Art Department—so that's how I met them. Adam Thompson, Gabe Ferrar and Devin Powers are the artists I'm talking about.

Anyway, I started it without the intention of starting a gallery. I wanted to put something together for open studios primarily because I had this big open living room, and because my roommates at the time also thought it would be fun.

BW: This is still the same location, right? 250 Moore Street, #108? Centotto?

PD: Exactly. Over 500 people came in one weekend during BOS. I enjoyed it, the artists enjoyed it, my housemates enjoyed it.

BW: Little did they know it would go on for 8+ years.

PD: Yeah, so I said, 'Well, I'll put together another show for the fall if it's all right with you guys.' They're like, 'Yeah, why not?' So I did, and I got some other artists involved, and it just kept growing from there. After the second and third shows, I thought I'd just keep going with them until for some reason I can't. So I just kept going, formalizing the program in different ways. It's not a commercial thing, which in a way provides me extra leeway to do things like 'simposio' shows that have reading and writing assignments, or strange concept shows that have artists responding to ideas perhaps outside of their practices. And so on.

BW: All the while, you were producing your own work. Could you talk about your show at Norte Maar in 2012?

PD: Well, Jason Andrew showed my work in some group shows going as far back as 2009, I believe, and I had show some work at Storefront when he and Deborah Brown were running it together. He had also seen my work at English Kills a couple times, and some other Bushwick spots as well.

So Jason liked my work, as did Julia Gleich, his collaborator at Norte Maar, and we started talking about a show. Because they love interdisciplinary stuff as much as I do, they suggested I put together a book of poetry or something as well.

It was great to meet Jason and Julia, and to get involved with Norte Maar early on, because they have the same feelings about divisions and disciplines. It's not that there aren't divisions, you know. Dance is definitely different from visual art, etc. But for them, as for me, if you can put things together, then why not put them together? If you have an idea for a way in which various disciplines can come together creatively and make something meaningful and maybe beautiful, then go for it. Jason and Julia do such things all the time.

That show was called Appearance Adrift in the Garden, and it had paintings, collages, assemblage works, and a series of my polytype monoprints. It was successful in a lot of ways, and I'll never forget it. It also definitely allowed for my second solo show, which was at Pocket Utopia, thanks to Austin Thomas. It was called Twilit Ensembles, and it had 'parallel' paintings, collages, and my first five series of Floor Translations drawings and sculptures.

BW: Austin is a fairy godmother of sorts.

PD: Yes. She had seen my work at Norte Maar and in group shows, and I'd been involved with some Pocket Utopia things earlier on too. Her disciplines are also various, from curatorial to her own art making. She works in mixed media, collaborates in many ways, also does some public art.

BW: Yup, there's a new public piece she just put up.

PD: Yeah, I go by it all the time! It's right down the street from me.

BW: How has Bushwick changed since the early days?

PD: Well, there are many more galleries. And though it's gotten harder for artists to have studios here, there aren’t fewer studios. There are more, and they’re a lot more expensive. I think one of the positive changes is the breadth and quality of the art. It has gotten consistently better from one year to the next, even from one season to the next sometimes, especially as the more DIY galleries have gotten better at what they do, really developed their programs, been joined by less-DIY kinds of operations, and so on. People who make and show work in Bushwick have gotten more serious, so other people have begun to take Bushwick more seriously. The scene has not gone away, and it hasn’t abated. It has gotten stronger and bigger. I’ve been operating Centotto for almost nine years, but there were a few years when there were not that many other galleries. About 5 years ago, the Bogart building started to fill up with galleries. In some sense, it’s about 9 years of art in the neighborhood, in some sense it’s about 5. It’s still not going anywhere. It’s on a pretty good footing.

Paul at Norte Maar’s dance concert in Socrates Park, Queen

BW: Could you talk about what community means to you and your practice, which is relational? In fact, you’re almost tagged as a mascot of Bushwick.

PD: James Panero called me the unofficial mascot of Bushwick. Mascot, Mayor, Maven, Maverick, other M words. Stephanie Theodore calls me the Renaissance Man. All fun, though I'm sure I don't live up to any of them.

Community is very important. In one sense, it operates a bit like economics. Without healthy competition or reasons to change and improve, you’re never going to advance. In art, it’s a bit different. You’re not really competing with your peers, but you always want to show them something new or different during a studio visit. And you always want to see them progressing in some way. In that sense, community is important because you need it to push each other, not just socialize and hang out. I have found Centotto’s function to be a platform for a lot of people. It’s not a totally proper gallery, obviously. But I have the space, and I've developed the program, and there’s a following, and a lot of this is thanks to and has fed back into the community. I can put up someone’s work, or assemble a group show or organize a crit, and works will be seen. Why not keep it up?

BW: A recent solo show of your work, Scriptive Formalities, unveiled a new body of work that came out of your interest in linguistics. Could you discuss it?

PD: Yeah, it was mostly all brand new. The only element that was not quite as new was the original basic line of small Chromatic Alphabet panels, because that took me a long time to develop. When I had the idea for it, back in 2013, I thought it was a pretty good one. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. But it was an idea, or a system, that I wanted to really get right before I moved on to make paintings with it. I really wanted to get this basic alphabet resolved in a way that I knew would stick for me before I made the works that would come out of it. Still, as soon I developed the vowels, I already knew I was onto something. I had some conversations with friends—like Irina Protopopescu, at Slag Gallery, and one of her artists, Dumitru Gorzo—and I remember showing them the initial vowels and telling them about the idea in general. Irina knew my work pretty well from a two-person show I did at her gallery in 2014, and I've been friends with her and Gorzo for a while, and they're both as deep into books and languages as well. They agreed that I had found quite a rabbit hole to keep exploring. What's funny to recall is that there was a feature of me inArtNews in 2014, while the show at Slag was up. When the photographer did the photo shoot, my Chromatic Alphabet was in the works on the wall in the studio, and it was just a kernel of an idea. The works in the show at Slag at that time had nothing to do with it.

BW: It was a pre-profile.

PD: At the time, the works that generated the most interest were my Floor Translations, I guess, and my Nocturne paintings, the 'parallel' paintings.

BW: New Floor Translations were in the back room of the Life on Mars show, Scriptive Formalities, right?

PD: Yeah, I’ve continued to work on those. I really enjoy them, and they have consistently gotten good responses. Roberta Smith wrote about them during my show at Pocket Utopia and rather liked them. So that was cool.

BW: Sounds like you’re now playing with new words in the alphabet.

PD: What makes me so happy about the Chromatic Alphabet works is the number of directions I can go with them. I learned a lot by making the Scriptive Formalities exhibit and talking about the work, seeing the reviews, getting feedback. The works can become complicated in some ways, but they can also become simpler. I think we all sometimes feel like we need to simplify what we’re doing here and there. Take a step back, make a reduction, edit. What I am always seeking with these is a simple logic that allows me to keep going. This will sometimes mean more complicated compositions, though. Other times, simpler ones.

BW: Sounds like you wanted to set some dimensions that would allow you to experiment.

PD: Something like that. So now I am making colorful paintings of shapes. They have neat, rich surfaces. It’s a very simple thing. So is the system. I can walk kids through it like an alphabet, and they get it very quickly. Or I can talk to you about it on the level of linguistics, because there are also complexities to it. And all of that makes me happy. I can put all these things I do into a body of work, and it can all be explained and expanded upon. But that's not always necessary. They're also just these candid, colorful abstract paintings.

BW: How would you describe the alphabet?

PD: Each letter is not a letter. It’s a shape and color representing a sound. So, when I talk about a painting like Anima, it's not just a painting that says the word 'anima.' It's also a painting of the look of the sound of the word 'anima.'

BW: Which translates to 'soul.'

PD: Yes, it's one of the words for 'soul' in Italian and Latin. The way that the layers of gesso have primary colors embedded into them, and the way that then the painted 'sounds', i.e. letters, sit on top of those layers, create a kind of evocation that happens from the back of the painting to the front. All of the colors in the works are primary or mixed from primaries. Very simple.

BW: I find it interesting that you’re operating in an expanded field between language and painting.

PD: It's innate I suppose. Even the guy that I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on back in grad school, the Italian writer Dino Buzzati, was also a painter. He wrote a lot, worked a lot as a journalist, made a lot of art. He has stories about painters and writers and painter-writers. Buzzati himself said he would've preferred to be a painter rather than a writer. At any rate, many of the paperbacks of his works feature his paintings on the covers.

BW: In a way, you have consciously designed your life around following a curious mind.

PD: Probably in a lot of ways, yes. And around working hard. And enjoying the fruits of that work. And building on knowledge, or trying to. I don't ever want to learn things, then forget them. Last fall, someone slammed into me on accident and knocked me up against a brick wall, and onto a concrete floor. I got busted up pretty good and had a concussion. I didn’t think it was a big deal, since I've busted myself up my whole life with skateboarding and other sports. But for the next few weeks, I was terrified I was going to lose one of my languages! I was more worried about that, or forgetting something that was important to me! I had concussion headaches for months thereafter, but at least my brain didn't get too messed up. Well, I don't think it did. Funny to say.

BW: I met a brilliant professor while studying at HBS,Clay Christenson. He suffered a heart attack, followed by cancer, then had a stroke. And, as a result, he had to relearn language, and he did it using the plastic tear sheets you see in airports. He’s an incredible inspiration.

PD: Wow.

PART 2: IN PAUL'S STUDIO

BW: Do you find that your work comes from a lens that crosses disciplines, or from one that has a specific discipline, e.g. linguistics, as an origin point?

PD: I think it's definitely interdisciplinary. In a way I always have as many writers in mind as I do artists when I'm working or coming up with new projects. Vito Acconci has always remained pretty important to me as an inspiration, in large part because my older sister exposed me to his work when I was pretty young. What's funny about that is that she wasn't aware at all, not then, of how much his work and my thinking about work would eventually dovetail. He's another artist who doesn't like to be inhibited by perceived divisions among disciplines, or who has no qualms about moving from one discipline to another.

I'm kind of like that too, but in my work there's a convergence of all of it, I think. I've actually put a variety of disciplines into the same place. Maybe that's my version of this whole thing. Making the disciplines and practices start to seem like one.

BW: You're in the camp of engaging in a dialogue within the work but also around the work.

PD: Yeah, and I'm also in the camp of, 'Why not?'. With basically everything, really. If you are compelled to do something creative, then why not do it?

BW: I'm in your camp.

PD: If there's a rule that says you're not supposed to talk about artwork, then why is there that rule, you know? Why not talk about artwork? You might as well also make a rule that says don't make artwork. Or you might as well also make a rule that says don't talk.

Of course, it's a matter of preference. Some artists don't like to talk about work, or not about their work, and that's also fine. Neither is there a rule that says you have to talk about it!

But I do think that if somebody wants to talk about your work, let it be talked about. After you make it, it's culture. People talk about culture.

BW: It reminds of a conversation I had this summer with John Penny at MICA, about the difference between intention and inference. Intention is throwing the ball. But inference is when someone catches the ball. They may have a totally different read out, and that's okay. And they may take it in another direction. I think that's great.

PD: It is. It's kind of like, you know, once you hit a baseball, you can control only so much where the ball goes. You know that by swinging this way you might be able to send it to left field, or by swinging that way you might be able to send it right, and you might be able to read into pitch to some extent. But you also know you can't have full control over it. You can control a lot, but your control remains an 'almost.' And still, your swing might miss!

BW: Unless you're like Babe Ruth or something. Point to the spot.

PD: Yeah, unless you're Babe Ruth!

BW: How do you feel about humor in your work?

PD: There's a lot of room for humor in the work. Especially in a lot of my narrative drawings, watercolors and so on. As for the Chromatic Alphabet paintings, I just need to keep making them so I can get to the humorous ones, too. I have plans for those. Fruits are involved. Or words for fruits!

PART 3: AT STUDIO 10, LOOKING AT NOMENCOLORATURE, CURATED BY PAUL

Paul in Studio 10 for “NOMENCoLorATURE”

BW: Could you describe the rules to this show?

PD: It was totally open call, and the rules were really simple: Get a 6 inch by 6-inch panel, about one inch deep. Then get some paints and mix a color. Paint the panel just that color, without putting too much texture or anything like that into it. And then on the back of the panel, write your name and the name of the color. That's it. The whole thing was about mixing a color, and naming the color. Colors and words. About 170 panels by about 140 contributors.

BW: So it had to be a mixed color?

PD: Yeah.

BW: So it's a new color.

PD: Yeah.

BW: That's the 'nomencolorature.'

PD: Yeah, exactly. Nomen-color-ature. Nomenclature and color.

BW: Could you talk about the shape; this linear tile format?

PD: Well, at my place, Centotto, where I had initially thought I'd install the show, my idea was that I would just make a big grid. But then Larry, here at Studio 10, was really interested in the exhibit and offered to host the first installation of it. He made a couple panels for it too. I thought I'd do the first version here, then later another version at Centotto. Then maybe others after that!

Here at Studio 10, it's installed as a kind of band or arc around the space, making it something you almost 'read.' It's a very interesting layout. Calming, engaging.

BW: It also has the feel of a domestic renovation of some kind.

PD: Yeah, I can see that for sure.

At Studio 10 discussing “NOMENCoLorATURE”

BW: Looking at the wall, I see Robert Walden and Henry Chung, Art Guerra, Larry’s work. The titles are great, like “Italian Roast," by Bob Seng.

PD: Those are all great ones. They all are. But I'll show you something really quickly before we go. When I was laying everything out, I wanted to try to keep friends near one another, and definitely to keep families together, because there are a few entire families that did them. In this way, I also ended up keeping couples together, married couples or not, and I began to realize that couples had very consistently ended up mixing colors in the same value range.

At Studio 10 discussing “NOMENCoLorATURE”

BW: That's interesting, and in some ways not surprising.

PD: Look. Here are Robert and Henry. Here are Amos and Patricia Satterlee. Michelle Araujo and Adam Simon. My younger sister and my brother-in-law. Brian DuPont and his wife. Sharon Lawless and Duane Zaloudek. Marcy Rosenblatt and Jim Donahue. Caroline Cox and Tim Spelios. Matt Friedman and Jude Tallichet. Len Bellinger and Denise Sfraga. All these sets in the same or very similar value ranges. It's crazy. There are even two people who very thoroughly broke the rules for the show, which is why their panels are at the end. I found out later that they're a couple!

BW: They busted it up.

PD: Yeah. I also found out by messing around with everything long enough that the show looks very cool in 3D glasses.

Topless is a unique artist-run space situated in the Rockaways. Founded and direct by Brent Birnbaum and Jenni Crain in 2014, Topless is known for it's forward-thinking programming, giving a platform to emerging artists, and a flexible model of renovating beach front spaces to open new summer seasons.

Jenni Crain and Brent Birnbaum

Brett Wallace: What is your origin in art?

Jenni Crain: I’ve always been really interested in art or artistic forms to varying degrees. I suppose I’ve been lucky in that sense; I always knew what my interests were and I slowly specified those interests. Thinking about it now – I could say that I continue to do so. Or maybe at this point I’m expanding them again! On and on…

As a kid, I wanted to be a writer. As a pre-teen/early teen, I wanted to go into fashion design, and so I started taking pre-college college courses at FIT. I would go to the institute every weekend and take various courses in fashion – design, history, patternmaking, silk screening. After a year or two, I began taking photo classes in their darkroom, which I loved, and digital, which felt practical - I was probably 13 or 14. I stuck with that until I applied to art school at Pratt Institute where I enrolled in 2009 as a drawing major. My big pivot at Pratt was from drawing to sculpture – realizing that my interests were in spatial considerations & conversations. Simultaneous to my studies – sculpture and art history – I began interning and assisting in galleries. I graduated with a degree in sculpture and a minor in art history in 2013.

I still work in a gallery; I still make sculptures and photographs; I still write.

Photo: Installation view from Babble On at Topless, Summer 2016. Work by Nadia Belerique, Lili Huston-Herterich, Laurie Kang. Photo by Adam Kremer. Courtesy of the artist and Topless.

Brent Birnbaum: Since I was a tiny tiny child, I've made "work." The language of visual art has always made more since to me than words and usually it’s easier. I've never stopped making things. My interests and projects have just gotten bigger as I've gotten older. I've done all the art schooling, working at galleries, running a gallery, all the jazz a lot of artists do.

It's influenced me of course, but my interests have not swayed that much from when I was in junior high. I'm fascinated with space, objects, and architecture and how they can be manipulated to say something new.

JC: For me, sculpture, especially at Pratt, is one of the programs that have critical thinking at its core - more so than technical coordination, which is, admittedly, crucial too though. So you do have that in addition. I was learning how to formulate/formalize my ideas and how to utilize material cues – how to speak about those thoughts rather than solely becoming a technically sound fabricator. I will give it to drawing too though – Pratt has a really advanced drawing program that is more spatially based than strictly tied to two dimensions. I like the way that Roni Horn speaks abut drawing. My boyfriend and I discuss it often.

BW: How would you describe your roles today?

JC: Whenever someone asks me, I just say that I work in the art world. I use the “art world” as a blanket term because I doubt that anyone bargains for the full explanation when they extend that simple question. In terms of actually breaking it down, yes, I'm an “artist”, I'm a “curator”, I’m a “gallerist”, and I think that those things definitely really influence each other. I run my own space, along with Brent, and I also work for a gallery in Chelsea. I make work. I’m also an avid art viewer, and I think that is just as much an active role as any of the others.

BB: I push myself as an artist and as a gallerist. If I wasn't, I should get a different job.

Photo: Installation view from Eric Wiley at Topless Projects, Summer 2016. Works by Eric Wiley. Photo by Adam Kremer. Courtesy of the artist and Topless.

BW: How do you manage the multiplicity of activities within each of those buckets?

BB: I manage them by having a full life not related to art. I surf and snowboard a lot to balance out a busy, active schedule. Physical activities engaged in nature keeps me sane for the long isolated studio days and sweating blood producing gallery installs.

JC: Oh, well, I think it’s just that I really, really love it all. I mean, for me, I never have to clock in and clock out because there’s no separation between work time and down time. It’s typically what I am naturally thinking of all the time or at least most the time, and it’s what I'm doing/working towards a majority of my time.

If I had to pinpoint a difficult joint, I suppose it would be dividing time from producing my own artwork. Even in that aspect though, I guess I'm in an ideal place – or a place that really works for me, personally - where my work is, for the most part, fabricated. I don’t feel the pressure of putting in a certain amount of hours in a physical studio space since my studio production is more along the lines of mentally developing my ideas, writing texts and moving on to sketch-up files – usually a friend helps me with the sketch-up files since I have definite room for improvement. Perhaps studio time this fall could be sitting with a selection of YouTube videos.

I really only have the ability, financially, to produce new works when I have an opportunity to exhibit new works. My practice is slow but I am interested in that pace in comparison to the way that many of my other projects develop and move forward. This sometimes does lead to a self-perpetuated flaw - that I sometimes put these other projects before my own artworks because they feel more pressing – due to this more rapid speed at which they develop but also because there are often outside parties involved and I want to put my best foot forward not just for myself but also for those also involved.

BW: Jenni, so it seems like you identify and define your work within a broader framework.

JC: Definitely. I think that somebody who had an inspiring idea of a broader framework was Alexander Dorner. The king of broader framework, Hans Ulrich Obrist, introduced me to him in Sharp Tongues, Loose Lips, Open Eyes, Ears to the Ground – an incredible book with an incredibly forgettable title – I always forget it but can picture the cover…. Dorner was the head of the Hanover Museum in the ‘20s. He spoke about the institution as a place of flux, a place that should ask and raise questions, rather than be a place of stagnant viewing, merely providing answers. I like to think that, in terms of working in these “multiple fields”, I am exploring beyond the bounds of a more traditional formula where curator, gallerist, and artist are separate entities. I do believe that they each naturally evolve, and as long as you’re open to it, influence each other.

BW: I call those swim lanes, by the way, and I think the more one can cross a swim lane, the better (avoiding bumping into people of course).

JC: I used to swim as a kid and I remember paddling over those plastic, rolling lanes from one lane into the other - the spinning gizmos pushing you forward. I guess it’s still kinda like that.

BW: For me, crossing lanes inspires ideas that can inform the other areas of a practice. And, it helps me to think about adjacencies Jan Verwoert discusses in his Open Museum lecture.

JC: Yeah. I do wonder sometimes if it’s a certain mode of operation that enables one to understand things that way and to undertake various projects to that degree. I do wonder if it’s in part due to my education – an education based in ideas and theory in contrast to one based more so in fact or equations – that enables me to recognize and chase such connections. I’ve had conversations, with people I very much respect and work with, where they seemingly take my desire to do each of these things as a sign that I’m, like, figuring out which one I am actually interested in. One person, who is very dear to me and works in a gallery, said to me, “You know being an artist is a full time job, right?” And I agree – but I think that my curatorial practice, etc. al, contributes to that or is part of that. And there are plenty of people who do operate in ways similar to that which I do – many, many - but I guess lots of the time people just expect you to stay in one damn lane!

Photo: Installation view from Horse in the Road at Topless, Summer 2015. Pictured: works by Anna Glantz. Photo by Adam Kremer. Courtesy of the artist and Topless.

BW: Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur who is also the co-founder of LinkedIn, uses the term “permanent beta,” to describe that everyone is a work in progress. And, I find that is a good mentality for thriving in a fast changing world.

JC: Of course. And one thing leads to another so why wouldn’t you want to evolve as everything around you does too?

JC: Well, as I mentioned earlier, Alexander Dorner is a good example, and I would love to learn more about him. Hans Ulrich also. I think Julie Ault is incredible. One of my favorite artists is Alejandro Cesarco. A part of me is hesitant to run down a list of folks – firstly, because there are so, so many, but also because a part of me fears being placed in or compared to their swim lane and not my own - but I should have less trepidations about giving credit where credit is due, huh?

I guess I am also aware of admiring a person or a program and consciously and subconsciously comparing your own abilities to that which you look up to. But I have to remain aware of the fact that I am only able to work within my means – which are very, very modest at the moment.

With Topless, for example, it’s such a specific project – and one that I am really proud of – you could say that it’s a less conventional model – Roberta Smith called us the “outlier of all outliers” - but that’s because that’s a way that we’re able to do it. It’s a really special and unique project and it’s one that heretofore has existed within my means each given summer. That first summer having graduated just the spring before. I can't afford a full-time space - in Rockaway or elsewhere - and so we have created a program that works for us as individuals and also gives back to a community where an offering like Topless was for the most part lacking.

BW: Where did the idea of Rockaway germinate from?

JC: Brent lived in Rockaway before we started the project and he still does. He moved to Rockaway following Sandy and wanted to participate and give back to the community in the wake of such a difficult time. I believe he was thinking about it one summer, and when that summer went by and the next one was rolling around he actively pursued the idea. Our mutual friend, Adam Parker Smith, put us in touch. When Brent brought up the idea to him - what he was thinking about and the kind of person he wanted to do it with – Adam proposed me. I was managing a gallery on the Lower East Side at the time and I was just putting in my notice. Adam put us in touch and Brent and I began to brainstorm - building “something” from “nothing” in what I think was pretty impressive time. We met mid-April 2014 and opened up mid-June.

We just wrapped up our third season.

BB: I moved to the Rockaways 4 years ago after years of visiting. After hurricane sandy, businesses were not returning to their storefronts. That's where the idea started. I wanted to help my hood get back on its feet, and I'd been around long enough to know good artists and how to run a space.

Photo: Installation view from A Sphinx Has Lain Down Next To Me at Topless, Summer 2014. Pictured: twilight by Paul Demuro. Courtesy of the artist and Topless.

BW: What was your vision for the space?

BB: To show artists I believed in who didn’t have a huge following already and to fix up storefronts to help rebuild the neighborhood.

JC: It’s evolved so much since we’ve known each other. Especially since we didn’t know what the program would or could become at the beginning, but we definitely embraced that opportunity for continuous evolution and that’s what excited us. There were all these storefronts that were available – damaged by Sandy or abandoned prior - that were still just sitting there. PS1 had only done their book dome pop-up the summer before. There was the Rockaway Artists Alliance, which is really great and is located in Fort Tilden and shows the work of Rockaway local artists. But it was kind of void in terms of the work that pushes the boundaries of what is conventionally perceived as art. So we thought about a space that would present such work, and it lead us to a way that we could tangibly give back to the community in terms of renovating these spaces and leaving them in a more manageable state so that they could be rented afterwards. From that first summer, we developed a formula by renovating this one space, opening mid-June and doing four shows, each three weekends long, which brought us right to the last weekend of August. And so that’s what we’ve done for the past three summers, now.

BW: So three different spaces, basically?

JC: Three different spaces, yep.

BW: You’re making it work – going back to the idea of "permanent beta" without a long-term space.

JC: Yeah! But I think that it is equally important to note that there have been so many people and amazing programs/projects prior that have done it before, followed a similar model. You know, we run a less traditional program than many a program out there, but we’re still learning and exploring how it is that we differ from and react to more typical structures. It’s interesting that you mentioned this particular moment for you [where this interview project started 2 ½ years ago], where you’ve done this for almost three years, and you find yourself at this point of maybe circling back and reinvestigating. Brent’s away for a month, and before he left we had what feels like a really important conversation - where we decided that our attention this off-season should not just be focused on the four exhibitions that typically comprise our program but more so on a critical approach to our program itself - what Topless has become, what we’ve learned, what we’ve loved about it / and not, and what we would ideally wish that it could do or introduce. We feel an importance in being more critical about what we’ve created and how we can further evolve in an alternative way. Up ‘til now, we have still adhered to exhibitions within a space, but due to the flexibility of operating without being tethered to a lease, maybe there is a point where we can push things even further. We’re brainstorming how – and why that feels important to us.

BW: One of the things I’ve loved about artists run spaces like TSA and OyG is that they’re operating more of a platform than actually being constricted to one type of work or another.

JC: Absolutely.

BW: Where do you see things going for Topless?

JC: I think it’s important that we take it season by season, so that we react and respond to our experience of the summer before. For the first time in these past three seasons, I think that we are really feeling a desire to shake things up – for ourselves and for our audience. We’re talking about ways of further shifting our mold and our mode where we can do things that we personally haven’t done before and learn something new on account of it - maybe things that haven't been so continuously accessible in Rockaway. There are other exhibition spaces in Rockaway now and so maybe we can offer something else.

We’re really at the beginning stages of this potential re-navigation here. The uncertainty feels challenging and exciting. We want to stay true to the personality that Topless has taken on – it feels like its own little being by this point. It’s not only a reflection of what Brent and I are interested in but also of the responses received by the community – Rockaway and the one that Topless has brought together – over the past few years.

One of the reasons that we settled on the title Topless is very tied to this conversation. Brent initially proposed the name and we agreed it felt right in its more immediate catch, but it wasn’t until I went to this talk at Artist Space led by David Joselit, discussing alternative programs and their role in the changing commercial art world, that I had my a-ha moment. He spoke about how, spaces like ours, are more dependent not upon an upward or downward / profit-driven margin, but by lateral, community-based expansion. Topless felt right in this regard. Then, also the fact that we renovate our spaces. And we’re by the beach….

BW: What do you think about the concept of “moving sideways”?

JC: I feel like that’s just as important as moving forward. I feel like moving sideways a lot of the time is moving forward.

BW: Topless in some cases is physically moving sideways as it does so conceptually.

JC: Yes, we are. A prevalent question in terms of Topless is what is growth? And what does it mean for us? What would we like for it to mean and how would we like for that growth to actualize itself through the program?

BW: Did you have a show that resonated with you personally?

JC: I don’t think I can choose a favorite, but the project in the back space, Topless Projects, with No School, the No School Residency, that was really exciting for me.

BW: Could you describe No School?

JC: No School is run by my friend, artist, Frank Traynor. He started the camp two summers ago in 2015 in participation with the Rockaway-based camp called Arts in Parts, which has existed in Rockaway for several yeas now and is really incredible. No School is a five-day-a-week, four-week program involving artist-led workshops with Rockaway campers.

Frank and I became acquainted our second season when Topless was located next to Arts in Parts, and Frank operated his seltzer shack and mud bath in what I guess I could call Topless’ front yard. Following that season, No School did a retrospective of the campers’ works in our former gallery space when we had moved out for the summer. It was really bittersweet for me because I had my first show going on, on top of work, and so I didn’t have time to personally participate to the degree that I would have liked. When Frank invited me to conduct my own artist-led workshop as a part of No School this past summer, I thought it a ripe moment to get Topless involved. Believing that it would be valuable for the campers to experience their works curated into a series of exhibitions within their own community within the vein of contemporary art.

BW: How did the kids respond?

JC: Frank and Diwa of Arts in Parts would come each weekend with a few campers. It was such a pleasure to engage with them about their responses to the courses and the camp as a whole. We also had Bedwyr Williams’ video, ‘The Starry Messenger’, playing in the main Topless space throughout the span of No School Residency, and so I think that was a really curious work for the kids – they’re 7 – 14 – to take in. Some of the campers were more seriously interested in art than others – typically the older campers, and so it felt like we could offer this lens of what it could be like to pursue art in the less conventional sense. Pursuing art certainly requires a great degree of passion, especially since you can’t just follow a recipe towards “success”.

BW: There is no recipe or if there is one, it's dangerous to follow.

JC: As “scrappy” as Topless may be it did feel important to share our project and our space with these youthful creatives because maybe it made them think a thing or two differently about the prospect of pursuing the arts.

BW: How do you think that your own curatorial work has evolved via Topless? What new projects do you have coming up?

JC: The work that we exhibit at Topless is often very different than the work that I make myself, and I feel like Topless has provided a platform and opportunities for me to explore these other points of view and interests. When presented with an invitation and opportunity I often choose to utilize curation as a tool, as an extension of that which I am exploring in my own work. It often feels like a part of my own practice whether it is immediately apparent or not. And I say that because I have curated a number of shows that maybe more obviously align with my own work and many others where perhaps the link reveals itself more slowly.

My dear friend, Lydia Glenn-Murray – who runs a space called Chin’s Push in LA – and I will be embarking on our second curatorial project together that will be held at a space called Roberta Pelan this January in Toronto. We curated our first exhibition together this past summer at Shanaynay in Paris and it was such a wildly wonderful experience. We really hit it off when bouncing back ideas and continuously challenge each other and expose each other to artists that we may not have been aware of prior and so I feel confident that Lydia and I will have an extended on-going relationship together from here forward.

I’ll also have a small show in Copenhagen this winter.

BW: What new ideas interest you?

BB: If you are referring to my own ideas, these are on my to do list:

1.Skaty cats - a rollerskating rink with 9 rooms, a glass ceiling with cats upstairs and ramps and hiding places for them everywhere.

2.A custom bowling alley - I'm not revealing any details yet

3.The hairy trinity of the big d - a cabinet of curiosities with scientific graphs I'm working on now for Dennis Rodman, Brian Bosworth, and Vanilla Ice.

4.Sofa sculpture - I'm working on this now too. I'm collecting 100 sofas. I just bought a van to make this vision a reality. It will be a painting with rooms combined with what it would look like if 100 sofas fell from the sky.

JC: I’ve been working with this idea of the frame – which I know is not an entirely “new idea” – but the system of the frame is something that I feel like really speaks to the facets of being human - it’s a support structure, providing this space of security, whether it’s the human frame, a photo frame, or an architectural frame… The frame of thought or mind…. I’m pretty influenced by architecture – the emotional affect and perception of a space and how even the most subtle of forms in space can redirect those reactions. I hope this doesn’t all sound vague…

BW: As you’re thinking about the frame, it sounds like, not only in terms of a space, but also in terms of a method of storage about pedagogy, the museum, institution, multiple levels of what we would consider a frame.

JC: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that conversation can be seen in my first exhibition, Upon Reflection, at Y Gallery last summer – these forms that cannot de divorced from the art historical cannon. But this investigation is probably more immediately accessible through my more curatorial pursuits.

BW: What are some of the skills that you feel you’ve acquired throughout that process of managing multiple ventures and being a critical thinker?

JC: I think that slowing down is a skill, really thinking things through – what and why - slowing down in terms of consideration rather than just jumping in to the next thing. Maybe saying no to a project or deciding not to make a piece that you may feel excited about - rather than just taking on another thing - if you don’t really have the time to understand why you’re doing it and what’s important about taking that step.

BW: Saying no is hard too.

JC: It is. It really is.

BW: Doing fewer things better is really important.

JC: Still good to say yes though, right? For me, I feel like yes is my more immediate response. Because I like to take on new projects, new challenges, but like you said I think its beneficial to critically consider why you are doing so.

BW: I think it’s really important to be open to possibilities in the process…saying yes (and specifically yes and to think generatively) is really important. But, saying no when the plate becomes full is also important.

JC: I know and sometimes it feels almost counterintuitive because activity breeds activity. But pausing – stillness - is just as important as motion.

BW: This is why creative energy is weird because I often find, my own best work doesn’t come from the original idea, and maybe not even the second idea, but it’s the third thing after, sometimes the accident.

JC: Maybe that’s a skill we’ve learned to… Accepting “failure” as a part of the process as it leads to the next alternative, which may be the thing we were seeking in the first place.

BW: Yeah, being comfortable with a high failure rate is important.

JC: Maybe adapting would be a skill that I’ve acquired… I like to plan but there is only so much you can prepare for. So, thinking, slowing down, and adapting.

BW: How do you shift and adapt?

JC: I think of adapting in terms of expectations - you’re not really going to learn much if you’re steadfast to one idea as the end all. I think that you should expect that that idea will evolve, perhaps due to something really boring – like logistical or financial reasons – but maybe working towards change itself is when the end result feels most exciting.

I feel like things never really can or will be exactly what you conceive of in your head. That’s why working with a collaborator is so fun – two heads are better than one, right?! I know… I’m so corny… But really though, there is inevitably a higher likelihood of unexpected results when working with someone else. Things are going to continuously evolve. Rolling with the punches is a big one.

BW: Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

JC: Yeah, that’s pretty good. Thanks, Mike. It’s natural.

That was something that felt important to extend with the No School project in the backspace. It was not always about selecting the work that was maybe the most successful in terms of what the workshop was attempting to accomplish. For example, we weren’t just selecting the most radical, rainbow piece of marbled paper from the marbling workshop. We were picking these pieces that arrived at a sort of place of accidental beauty – what may have been deemed by a camper as an unsuccessful example. That important lesson learned again, things don’t always turn out the way that you anticipate but you really have to be open to and embrace that.

In terms of curating, that’s huge, because when you invite an artist you don’t always know what specific piece you’ll get – you’re decision to work with that artist is in response to their practice, interests and ideas as a whole, and how that relates to the idea that you may be working with. It’s this really awesome mutual and on-going support system.

Below you will find images of work by Jenni Crain and Brent Birnbaum exhibited outside of Topless.